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Blooms Modern Critical Interpretations

Ernest Hemingways

A Farewell to Arms
New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities

Yale University

Editorial Consultant, Matthew J. Bruccoli

Blooms Modern Critical Interpretations:
Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to ArmsNew Edition
Copyright 2009 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction 2009 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ernest Hemingways A farewell to arms / edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom.New ed.
p. cm.(Blooms modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9624-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961.
Farewell to Arms. 2. World War, 1914-1918United StatesLiterature and the war.
I. Bloom, Harold.
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Contents
Editors Note

vii

Introduction
1
Harold Bloom
Critic Lavishes Praise on New Hemingway Novel
James Aswell
Not Yet Demobilized
Malcolm Cowley

Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave

T. S. Matthews

13

Books
19
John Dos Passos
Fiction by Adept Hands
H. L. Mencken

23

Ford Madox Ford on the Opening

Ford Madox Ford

25

The Story Behind the Love Story

Robert Penn Warren

27

The Mountain and the Plain

Carlos Baker

35

vi

Contents

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

Sheridan Baker

55

Going Back
71
Michael S. Reynolds
The Sense of an Ending
Bernard Oldsey

83

Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor

Millicent Bell
Hemingway on War and Peace
Erik Nakjavani
Class Ten: A Farewell to Arms
Matthew J. Bruccoli

95

111
143

You Dont Know the Italian Language Well Enough:

The Bilingual Dialogue of A Farewell to Arms
Mark Cirino
Going All to Pieces:
A Farewell to Arms as Trauma Narrative
Trevor Dodman
Hemingways Camera Eye: The Problem
of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form
Zoe Trodd
Chronology

223

Contributors

225

Bibliography

229

Acknowledgments
Index

237

235

167

185

209

Editors Note
My Introduction briefly but poignantly describes the style of A Farewell to
Arms as aesthetic impressionism in the tradition of Keats, Pater, Conrad,
and Stephen Crane.
As the late Matthew J. Bruccoli gathered together a large bevy of reviews and essays, I will comment here upon only a few high points.
The reviews by Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos and H. L. Mencken
are all of undoubted historical interest.
For critical perceptiveness, Robert Penn Warren comes first, while
Carlos Baker and Millicent Bell investigate aspects of Hemingwayan
self-mystification.
Bruccoli himself contributes a useful pedagogical intervention, after
which the remaining essayists return to linguistic and psychological issues
in the novel.

vii

H arold B loom

Introduction
er ne s t he m ing way (1899 19 61)

f A Farewell to Arms fails to sustain itself as a unified novel, it does remain

Hemingways strongest work after the frequent best of the short stories
and The Sun Also Rises. It also participates in the aura of Hemingways
mode of myth, embodying as it does not only Hemingways own romance
with Europe but the permanent vestiges of our national romance with the
Old World. The death of Catherine represents not the end of that affair,
but its perpetual recurrence. I assign classic status in the interpretation of
that death to Leslie Fiedler, with his precise knowledge of the limits of
literary myth: Only the dead woman becomes neither a bore nor a mother;
and before Catherine can quite become either she must die, killed not by
Hemingway, of course, but by childbirth! Fiedler finds a touch of Poe in
this, but Hemingway seems to me far healthier. Death, to Poe, is after all
less a metaphor for sexual fulfillment than it is an improvement over mere
coition, since Poe longs for a union in essence and not just in act.
Any feminist critic who resents that too-lovely Hemingwayesque
ending, in which Frederic Henry gets to walk away in the rain while poor
Catherine takes the death for both of them, has my sympathy, if only because
this sentimentality that mars the aesthetic effect is certainly the mask for a
male resentment and fear of women. Hemingways symbolic rain is read by
Louis L. Martz as the inevitable trope for pity, and by Malcolm Cowley as a
conscious symbol for disaster. A darker interpretation might associate it with
Whitmans very American confounding of night, death, the mother, and
the sea, a fourfold mingling that Whitman bequeathed to Wallace Stevens,
T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, among many others. The death of the beloved


Harold Bloom

woman in Hemingway is part of that tropological cosmos, in which the moist

element dominates because death the mother is the true image of desire. For
Hemingway, the rain replaces the sea, and is as much the image of longing as
the sea is in Whitman or Hart Crane.
Robert Penn Warren, defending a higher estimate of A Farewell to
Arms than I can achieve, interprets the death of Catherine as the discovery
that the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited
meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure. Such a reading,
though distinguished, seems to me to belong more to the literary cosmos of
T.S. Eliot than to that of Hemingway. Whatever nostalgia for transcendental
verities Hemingway may have possessed, his best fiction invests its energies in
the representation of personal relationships, and hardly with the tendentious
design of exposing their inevitable inadequacies. If your personal religion
quests for the matador as messiah, then you are likely to seek in personal
relationships something of the same values enshrined in the ritual of bull and
bullfighter: courage, dignity, the aesthetic exaltation of the moment, and an
all but suicidal intensity of beingthe sense of life gathered to a crowded
perception and graciously open to the suddenness of extinction. That is a
vivid but an unlikely scenario for an erotic association, at least for any that
might endure beyond a few weeks.
Wyndham Lewis categorized Hemingway by citing Walter Pater
on Prosper Mrime: There is the formula . . . the enthusiastic amateur of
rude, crude, naked force in men and women. . . . Painfully distinct in outline,
inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they stand. Around them, Pater added,
what Mrime gave you was neither more nor less than empty space. I
believe that Pater would have found more than that in Hemingways formula,
more in the men and women, and something other than empty space in their
ambiance. Perhaps by way of Joseph Conrads influence upon him, Hemingway
had absorbed part at least of what is most meaningful in Paters aesthetic
impressionism. Hemingways women and men know, with Pater, that we have
an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Our one chance is to pack
that interval with the multiplied fruit of consciousness, with the solipsistic
truths of perception and sensation. What survives times ravages in A Farewell
to Arms is precisely Hemingways textually embodied knowledge that art alone
apprehends the moments of perception and sensation, and so bestows upon
them their privileged status. Consider the opening paragraph of chapter 16:
That night a bat flew into the room through the open door that
led onto the balcony and through which we watched the night over
the roofs of the town. It was dark in our room except for the small
light of the night over the town and the bat was not frightened but
hunted in the room as though he had been outside. We lay and

Introduction

watched him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still.

After he went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the
beam move across the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A
breeze came in the night and we heard the men of the anti-aircraft
gun on the next roof talking. It was cool and they were putting on
their capes. I worried in the night about some one coming up but
Catherine said they were all asleep. Once in the night we went to
sleep and when I woke she was not there but I heard her coming
along the hall and the door opened and she came back to the bed
and said it was all right she had been downstairs and they were
all asleep. She had been outside Miss Van Campens door and
heard her breathing in her sleep. She brought crackers and we ate
them and drank some vermouth. We were very hungry but she
said that would all have to be gotten out of me in the morning. I
went to sleep again in the morning when it was light and when I
was awake I found she was gone again. She came in looking fresh
and lovely and sat on the bed and the sun rose while I had the
thermometer in my mouth and we smelled the dew on the roofs
and then the coffee of the men at the gun on the next roof.
The flight of the bat, the movement of the searchlights beam and of the
breeze, the overtones of the antiaircraft gunners blend into the light of the
morning, to form a composite epiphany of what it is that Frederic Henry has
lost when he finally walks back to the hotel in the rain. Can we define that
loss? As befits the aesthetic impressionism of Pater, Conrad, Stephen Crane,
and Hemingway, it is in the first place a loss of vividness and intensity in
the world as experienced by the senses. In the aura of his love for Catherine,
Frederic Henry knows the fullness of It was dark and It was cool, and
the smell of the dew on the roofs, and the aroma of the coffee being enjoyed
by the anti-aircraft gunners. We are reminded that Paters crucial literary
ancestors were the unacknowledged Ruskin and the hedonistic visionary
Keats, the Keats of the Ode on Melancholy. Hemingway too, particularly
in A Farewell to Arms, is an heir of Keats, with the poets passion for sensuous
immediacy, in all of its ultimate implications. Is not Catherine Barkley a
belated and beautiful version of the goddess Melancholy, incarnating
Keatss Beauty that must die? Hemingway too exalts that quester after the
Melancholy,

whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joys grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

J ames A swell

Critic Lavishes Praise

On New Hemingway Novel

have finished A Farewell to Arms, and am still a little breathless, as

people often are after a major event in their lives. If before I die I have three
more literary experiences as sharp and exciting and terrible as the one I have
just been through, I shall know it has been a good world.
That, I am aware, is extravagant praise. Perhaps I should have begun
more cautiously. Because I do not know whether A Farewell to Arms is
a great book or not, or whether it will live. I do not know and I do not
give a damn; those are considerations for The New York Times and the sages
in the great institution ninety miles to Richmonds northwest. I only know
that there are many people who will be deeply stirred by this tender, brutal,
devastatingly simple love story; stirred as they have never been by Dreisers
clumsy magnificence, or Andersons naively cynical rusticism, or Cabells anagrams. These people may well stand before some imposing fifty-foot shelf
and wonder, frightened, Where is there another to go, candidly, by his side?
Where can I match that hot, four-dimensional life or that prose stripped of
a thousand years of prolixities? With all the great names its unnerving that I
should have to think at all!
A Farewell to Arms is not a war story primarily, despite the publishers
blurbs and the assumption of the two or three reviews I have read. The war
is always there, a background, in the mountains, but it can no more be
Richmond Times-Dispatch (October 6, 1929): p. 3. Copyright Richmond Times-Dispatch.

James Aswell

considered the theme than hospitals can be considered the theme because
the last few thousand words have their setting in one. What Hemingway
wants to do, and does do, is to tell the story of Frederick [sic] Henry and
Catherine Barkley. It is the story of two young people and what they said
to each other and the loving they had together. And secondarily it is a story
of the sentient natural world enjoyed not through the head but through the
senses properly, of cold mornings and rain and good food; of wine and pain
and fear and deep sleep; of the rank, healthy talk of men together and fine,
blasphemous laughter.
More than any other writer I know Hemingway has eliminated the odor
of the lamp from his prose. Years ago in Paris he told Sisley Huddleston that
he wanted to divorce language from its superfluities. No wonder poor, old,
grandiloquent Sisley didnt like him at all! I cannot imagine Hemingway in his
first literary company, under the pale, effete, pseudo-cerebral auspices of This
Quarter and The Dial and The Little Review. But it is certain he could not
have gotten his stuff into print anywhere else, and I suppose they saw only that
he was different, without recognizing his, to them, treacherous masculinity.
***
Perhaps the thing that sets Hemingway head and shoulders above the
sophisticates with whom he has often been libelously grouped, is his not
being afraid of tenderness. But the tenderness is always removed a little, in
space, as it were, from the passage. He seeks no euphemisms: he is never
whimsical in the revolting Milne-Barrie sense. But he is sensitive to sorrowful beauty without feeling pity about it. He seems to say, These people
are headed for a bad time, but it is good that they are living fully now.
Once Catherine asks Frederick whether they shoot larks in America. Not
especially, he replies. It may be that I am sinking into obscurantism, but I
believe that interchange conveys the sort of tenderness, humorous, warm[th],
that Hemingway has. Its absence is what frequently betrays imitators of the
Hemingway manner such as Morley Callaghan.
A Farewell to Arms is a rhythmic, plethoric, bitterly lovely story. If anything better has been produced by a native of the New World I do not know
what it is. And as for me, I have never gotten a greater kick out of any book.

M alcolm C owley

Not Yet Demobilized

rnest Hemingway during the last five years has won an extraordinary
place in American letters. He has thousands of adherents among the readers
of his own age; there are younger writers of talent who accept his leadership;
he is imitated by writers much older than himselfa rare phenomenonand
one finds traces of his influence almost everywhere. His name is generally
mentioned with the respect that one accords to a legendary figure. From critics he has received a quite special treatmentmany of them have praised him
equally for his own qualities and for others he never possessed, and a few did
not wait for his second novel before comparing him with James Joyce, with
Smollett and Defoe, almost with Homer.
Doubtless some of the reasons for this sudden fame are extraliterary:
it may partly be attributed to his living away from New York and its literary
jealousies, to his ability to surround himself with a legend, to the pride which
has kept him from commercializing his work, and also in some degree to his
use of rather sensational material; but nevertheless one is forced to conclude
that the principal explanation lies in his having expressed better than any
other writer, the limited viewpoint of his contemporaries, of the generation
which was formed by the war and which is still incompletely demobilized.
Even today, eleven years after the armistice, there are many who retain
the attitude of soldiers on an extended but uncertain furlough; at any moment
New York Herald Tribune Books, XII (October 6, 1929): pp. 1, 16.

Malcolm Cowley

they are liable to be summoned back to the guns which, for them, still thunder
along the Aisne and the Isonzo. They attach very little importance to the laborious ambitions of a world at peace with itself. They have the wartime state
of mind, with its dislike for responsibility, its sense of impermanence, its thirst
for novelty and danger.
Most of the characters in Hemingways stories belong to this category
of the undemobilized. Their standards are the very simple standards of men at
war. The virtues they admire are generosity, courage, a certain resignation and
also the ability to hold ones liquor. The vices they ridicule are vices only to
men who have been soldiers: I mean thrift, caution and sobriety. Their simple
enjoyments are food, drink, love and perhaps fishing; their tragedies are love,
parting, death; and they discuss these topics with the frankness of the barracksbeneath which is not too carefully hidden a martial sentimentality.
To describe these characters, Hemingway has adopted a simple and very
appropriate method: we might agree on calling it subtractive. From the novel
as conceived by older writers, he has subtracted the embellishments; he has
subtracted all the descriptions, the meditations, the statements of theory and
he has reserved only the characters and their behavior, their acts, their sensual perceptions, their words. The last he sets down almost stenographically.
As for the acts and perceptions, he redates them in very great detail, almost
redundantly, in brief sentences that preserve, in spite of certain mannerisms,
the locutions, the rhythms and the loose syntax of common American speech.
The general effect is one of deliberate unsophistication.
This method, which he developed in his first four books, has been somewhat modified in his new novel. The style has changed first of all: the rhythm
is more definite, the sentences are often longer, and the paragraphs are more
carefully constructed. In treatment Hemingway has departed to a certain
extent from his former strict behaviorism: he has added landscapes and interior monologues to his range of effects, and he has even begun to discuss
ideas. In mood he reveals a new tenderness, and it is interesting to observe
that the present volume is his first love story, properly speaking. It is also his
first long story about the war, his first novel in the strict senseThe Sun
Also Rises was an extended episodeand undoubtedly the most important
book he has written.
***
A Farewell to Arms is perhaps the only American war novel in which the
hero drives an ambulance. I find this somewhat remarkable, and for a very
simple reason. Just as the typical British war novels are written by former
captains of infantry, and German novels of the same class by privates with a
just grievance, so the typical American war novels, beginning with Three

Not Yet Demobilized

Soldiers and perhaps not ending with the present volume, have been written by former ambulance drivers.
It is hard to say why this one branch of the army should have been so
literary. Perhaps it is because young writers were patriotic in 1917, and because enlisting in the ambulance service was the quickest means of reaching
the front. Perhaps it is because the idea of transporting the wounded, even
in reconditioned Fords over bad roads, appealed to the romantic side of their
natures. I doubt it. All I know for certain is that in one typical section of thirty
men, there were three who later became professional writers, in addition to
a painter, an architect, a philologist, and almost the whole football squad of
a large preparatory school. The conditions were similar in other sections I
visited; and, in fact, after reading a roster of the American Ambulance, one
begins to regard it as a sort of college extension course for the present generation of writers.
But what did it teach? How did it color the minds of the young men
who drove at the front? . . . The question is much too general. However, one
important effect of the ambulance service on some of its members was to
develop what might be called a spectatorial attitude toward the war.
***
Meanwhile let us return to the novel, and to Frederic Henry, American
volunteer with the Italian army and lieutenant in charge of an ambulance
section on the Isonzo front. His associates were less intellectual than those he
might have met on the Chemin des Dames:. most of them were tired and very
middleclass Italian officers. However, his own attitude was the one I have
tried to describe: that of a spectator who was beginning to lose his interest.
This attitude is especially evident in the first part of the novel. Everythingthe war, the weather, the epidemic of cholera, the conversation at
the mess tableis repeated impartially, as from a great distance or by the
military observer of a neutral power. Even when the hero is wounded by a
trench mortar he is only the spectator of his own disaster. I sat up straight,
he says, and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights
on a dolls eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm
and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and
leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasnt there. My hand
went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt
and another floating light came very slowly down and I looked at my leg and
was very afraid.
He was carried off to the dressing station, still observing the war and his
own wounds dispassionately. However, he was destined to be carried out of
himself by two events which together form the plot of the novel. The first was
his falling in love. The second was the Italian retreat from the Isonzo.

10

Malcolm Cowley

In Gorizia, before being wounded, he had met an English nurse and

had desired her merely because this was better than going every evening to
the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap
on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs. He met her
again in Milan while in the hospital and fell completely and suddenly in love.
She went on night duty to be alone with him. They would be married soon,
very soon, the moment they could obtain the necessary papers. Catherine was
going to have a child.
He was ordered back to the front before anything had really been arranged. Three days after his return the Germans broke through at Caporetto.
The description of the Italian retreat, with its sleeplessness, its hunger, its
growing disorganization, its lines of tired men marching in the rain, is perhaps the finest single passage that Hemingway has written. It calls to mind a
great description by another writer: I mean Stendhals account of the retreat
from Waterloo. The two are by no means equal, but it is enough that they can
be mentioned in the same breath.
At the end of the long wooden bridge over the Tagliamento Henry was
halted by the battle police. They had been executing every officer above the
rank of captain for abandoning his troops; now they were about to execute
this American because he spoke Italian with an accent and might possibly
be a spy. He escaped from them by diving into the flooded river; he made
his way to Milan; he followed Catherine to Lake Maggiore, and the two of
them, now both deserters, crossed the Swiss frontier at night. The passage
that follows is a long winter idyll; the life of two lovers, alone in the mountains, a tender contrast to the retreat through the Venetian plain. The novel
ends, however, in another hospital: it ends with Catherine dying in childbirth
and with her lover standing beside her body after having ordered the nurses
to leave the room. The final paragraph is entirely typical of Hemingways
method: it implies all the emotion of the scene by a simple statement of the
acts performed:
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the
light it wasnt any good. It was like saying good-bye to a statue.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to
the hotel in the rain.

One cannot help thinking that A Farewell to Arms is a symbolic title;

that it is Hemingways farewell to a period, an attitude, and perhaps to a
method also. As the process of demobilization draws slowly to its end the
simple standards of wartime are being forgotten. Pity, love, adventurousness,
anger, the emotions on which his earlier books were based, almost to the
entire exclusion of ideas, are less violently stimulated in a world at peace. The

Not Yet Demobilized

11

emotions as a whole are more colored by thought; perhaps they are weaker
and certainly they are becoming more complicated. They seem to demand
expression in a subtler and richer prose. The present novel shows a change in
this direction, and perhaps the change may extend still fartherwho knows.
Perhaps even Hemingway may decide in the end that being deliberately unsophisticated is not the height of sophistication.

T. S . M atthews

Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave

he writings of Ernest Hemingway have very quickly put him in a prominent place among American writers, and his numerous admirers have looked
forward with impatience and great expectations to his second novel. They
should not be disappointed: A Farewell to Arms is worthy of their hopes
and of its authors promise.
The book is cast in the form which Hemingway has apparently delimited
for himself in the noveldiary form. It is written in the first person, in that
bare and unliterary style (unliterary except for echoes of Sherwood Anderson
and Gertrude Stein), in that tone which suggests a roughly educated but
sensitive poet who is prouder of his muscles than of his vocabulary, which we
are now accustomed to associate with Hemingways name. The conversation
of the characters is as distinctly Hemingway conversation as the conversation
in one of Shaws plays is Shavian. But there are some marked differences between A Farewell to Arms and Hemingways previous work.
For one thing, the design is more apparent, the material more solidly
arranged. Perhaps the strongest criticism that could be levelled against The
Sun Also Rises was that its action was concerned with flotsam in the eddy
of a backwater. It was apparently possible for some readers to appreciate the
masculinity of Hemingways anti-literary style, to admit the authenticity of
his characters, and still to say, What of it? This criticism I do not consider
The New Republic, Fall Literary Section (October 9, 1929): pp. 208210.

13

14

T. S. Matthews

validthere has always been, it seems to me, in the implications of Hemingways prose, and in his characters themselves, a kind of symbolic content that
gives the least of his stories a wider range than it seems to coverbut such a
criticism was certainly possible. It is not, however, a criticism that can possibly
be directed against A Farewell to Arms. Fishing, drinking, and watching
bullfights might be considered too superficial to be the stuff of tragedy, but
love and death are not parochial themes.
The story begins in the summer of one of the middle years of the War.
The hero is an American, Frederick Henry, in the Italian army on the Isonzo,
in charge of a section of ambulances. It is before America has declared war,
and he is the only American in Gorizia. But an English hospital unit has
been sent down: he meets one of the nurses, Catherine Barkley, and falls in
love with her. In the Italian offensive, he is wounded, and taken back to the
base hospital in Milan where she too manages to be transferred. He is ordered
to the front again just in time to be caught in the Caporetto retreat. In the
mad scramble across the plains he loses the main column, is almost cut off
by the Germans, and then almost shot by the Italians for not being with his
section. He escapes, makes up his mind to desert from the army, and gets to
Milan, where he eventually finds Catherine again. He is in mufti, the police
are suspicious, and with the connivance of a friendly barman they row across
the border into Switzerland. Their passports are in order, so they escape being
interned. Catherine is going to have a baby. They spend the winter in a little
cottage in the mountains, and in the spring go down to Lausanne, where the
baby is to be born. Everything goes well for a time; then the doctor advises a
Caesarean operation; the baby is born dead, and Catherine has an unexpected
hemorrhage and dies. Here the story ends. Or not quite here. Hemingways
characteristic last sentence is: After a while I went out and left the hospital
and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
The book has more in it than The Sun Also Rises; it is more of a story;
and it is more carefully written. Sometimes this care is too evident.
I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights
when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make
it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all
there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing
who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so
exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring
in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.
Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes
morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp
and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost.

Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave

15

This is a good description, but it is Hemingway gone temporarily Gertrude

Stein. There is one other striking example of this manner, not new to
Hemingway, but new to his serious vein:
I love your beard, Catherine said. Its a great success. It looks so
stiff and fierce and its very soft and a great pleasure.

This speech of Catherines occurs toward the end of the book. When she is
first introduced, she talks, plausibly enough, in a manner which, though distinctly Hemingway, might also pass as British. In the last half of the book,
(except for the Gertrude Stein lapse quoted above), she is pure Hemingway.
The change that comes over her, the change that comes over both the main
characters, is not, I think, due to the authors carelessness. Whether he
deliberately planned this metamorphosis or half-consciously allowed it to
take place is of minor interest. The interesting and the significant thing is
the nature of the change. A typical Hemingway hero and a not-quite-sotypical Hemingway heroine are transformed, long before the end, into the
figures of two ideal lovers.
Hemingway has been generally regarded as one of the most representative spokesmen of a lost generationa generation remarkable chiefly for its
cynicism, its godlessness, and its complete lack of faith. He can still, I think,
be regarded as a representative spokesman, but the strictures generally implied against his generation will soon, perhaps, have to be modified or further
refined. As far as Hemingway himself is concerned, it can certainly no longer
be said that his characters do not embody a very definite faith.
They wont get us, I said. Because youre too brave. Nothing
ever happens to the brave.

Rinaldi, the Italian surgeon who is the heros roommate in the first part of
the book, has what almost amounts to a breakdown because he can discover
nothing in life outside is three anodynes of women, wine and work. The
note of hopelessness that dominated the whole of The Sun Also Rises
is not absent in A Farewell to Arms, nor is it weaker, but it has been
subtly modified, so that it is not the note of hopelessness we hear so much
as the undertone of courage. Hemingway is now definitely on the side of
the angels, fallen angels though they are. The principal instrument of this
change is Catherine. Brett, the heroine of The Sun Also Rises, was really
in a constant fever of despair; the selfless faith which Catherine gives her
lover may seem to come from a knowledge very like despair, but it is not a
fever. When we look back on the two women, it is much easier to believe
in Bretts actual existence than in CatherinesBrett was so imperfect, so

16

T. S. Matthews

unsatisfactory. And, like an old soldier, it would have been wrong for Brett
to die. The Lady in the Green Hat died, but Brett must live. But Catherine
is Brettan ennobled, a purified Brett, who can show us how to live, who
must die before she forgets how to show usdeified into the brave and
lovely creature whom men, if they have never found her, will always invent.
This apotheosis of bravery in the person of a woman is the more striking
because Hemingway is still the same apparently blunt-minded writer of
two-fisted words. He still has a horror of expressing delicate or noble sentiments, except obliquely.
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words
sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had
heard them . . . and had read them, on proclamations that were
slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long
time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were
glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards
at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and
finally only the names of places had dignity.

And his prophecy of individual fate is, if anything, more brutally pessimistic
than ever:
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the
broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very
good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are
none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be
no special hurry.

He will not even call Catherine brave, except through the lips of her lover.
Here he is describing how she acted in the first stages of labor:
The pains came quite regularly, then slackened off. Catherine was
very excited. When the pains were bad she called them good ones.
When they started to fall off she was disappointed and ashamed.

Hemingway is not a realist. The billboards of the world, even as he writes

about them, fade into something else: in place of the world to which we are
accustomed, we see a land and a people of strong outlines, of conventionalized shadow; the people speak in a clipped and tacit language as stylized
as their appearance. But Hemingways report of reality is quite as valid as a
realists. The description of the War, in the first part of A Farewell to Arms,

Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave

17

is perhaps as good a description of war just behind the front as has been written; and a fresh report from a point of view as original as Hemingways is
an addition to experience. But this book is not essentially a war-story: it is a
love-story. If love-stories mean nothing to you, gentle or hard-boiled reader,
this is not your book.
The transition, indeed, from the comparative realism of the war scenes to
the ideal reality of the idyll is not as effective as it might be. The meeting of the
lovers after Henrys desertion from the army, and their escape into Switzerland, have not that ring of authenticity about them which from Hemingway
we demand. We are accustomed to his apparent irrelevancies, which he knows
how to use with such a strong and ironic effect, but the scene, for instance,
between the lovers and Ferguson in the hotel at Stresa seems altogether too irrelevant, and has no ironic or dramatic value, but is merely an unwanted complication of the story. From this point until the time when the lovers are safely
established in Switzerland, we feel a kind of uncertainty about everything that
happens; we cannot quite believe in it. Why is it, then, that when our belief is
reawakened, it grows with every page, until once more we are convinced, and
passionately convinced, that we are hearing the truth?
I think it is because Hemingway, like every writer who has discovered
in himself the secret of literature, has now invented the kind of ideal against
which no mans heart is proof. In the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms,
he has transferred his action to a stage very far from realism, and to a plane
which may be criticized as the dramatics of a sentimental dream. And it is
a dream. Catherine Barkley is one of the impossibly beautiful characters of
modern tragedythe Tesses, the Alyoshas, the Myshkins1who could never
have existed, who could not live even in our minds if it were not for our hearts.
In that sentimentalism, that intimation of impossible immortality, poets and
those who hear them are alike guilty.
Hemingway himself is doubtless a very different sort of man from the
people pictured in his books: he may well have very different ideas about the
real nature of life; but as long as books remain a communication between
us, we must take them as we understand them and feel them to be. Nothing ever happens to the brave. It is an ambiguous statement of belief, and
its implications are sufficiently sinister, but its meaning is as clear and as
simple as the faith it voices. It is a mans faith; and men have lived and died
by much worse.

No t e
1. The protagonists of Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles (1891), Dostoyevskys
The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and The Idiot (1868).

J ohn D os P assos

Books

emingways A Farewell to Arms is the best written book that has seen
the light in America for many a long day. By well-written I dont mean the
tasty college composition course sort of thing that our critics seem to consider good writing. I mean writing that is terse and economical, in which
each sentence and each phrase bears its maximum load of meaning, sense
impressions, emotions. The book is a first-rate piece of craftsmanship by a
man who knows his job. It gives you the sort of pleasure line by line that
you get from handling a piece of well-finished carpenters work. Read the
first chapter, the talk at the officers mess in Gorizia, the scene in the dressing station when the narrator is wounded, the paragraph describing the
ride to Milan in the hospital train, the talk with the British major about
how everybodys cooked in the war, the whole description of the disaster at
Caporetto to the end of the chapter where the battlepolice are shooting the
officers as they cross the bridge, the caesarian operation in which the girl
dies. The stuff will match up as narrative prose with anything thats been
written since there was any English language.
Its a darn good document too. It describes with reserve and exactness
the complex of events back of the Italian front in the winter of 1916 and the
summer and fall of 1917 when people had more or less settled down to the
thought of war as the natural form of human existence, when every individual

New Masses, Volume 5 (December 1, 1929): p. 16.

19

20

John Dos Passos

in the armies was struggling for survival with bitter hopelessness. In the absolute degradation of the average soldiers life in the Italian army there were two
hopes, that the revolution would end the war or that Meester Weelson would
end the war on the terms of the Seventeen Points. In Italy the revolution lost
its nerve at the moment of its victory and Meester Weelsons points paved the
way for DAnnunzios bloody farce at Fiume and the tyranny of Mussolini
and the banks. If a man wanted to learn the history of that period in that sector of the European War I dont know where hed find a better account than
in the first half of A Farewell to Arms.
This is a big time for the book business in America. The writing, publishing and marketing of books is getting to be a major industry along with beauty
shops and advertising. Ten years ago it was generally thought that all writers
were either drunks or fairies. Now they have a halo of possible money around
them and are respected on a par with brokers or realtors. The American people
seem to be genuinely hungry for books. Even good books sell.
Its not surprising that A Farewell to Arms, that accidentally combines
the selling points of having a love story and being about the war, should be
going like hotcakes. It would be difficult to dope out just why there should be
such a tremendous vogue for books about the war just now. Maybe its that
the boys and girls who were too young to know anything about the last war
are just reaching the bookbuying age. Maybe its the result of the intense military propaganda going on in schools and colleges. Anyhow if they read things
like A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, they are certainly
getting the dope straight and its hard to see how the militarist could profit
much. Certainly a writer cant help but feel good about the success of such an
honest and competent piece of work as A Farewell to Arms.
After all craftsmanship is a damn fine thing, one of the few human
functions a man can unstintedly admire. The drift of the Fordized world
seems all against it. Rationalization and subdivision of labor in industry tend
more and more to wipe it out. Its getting to be almost unthinkable that you
should take pleasure in your work, that a man should enjoy doing a piece of
work for the sake of doing it as well as he damn well can. What we still have
is the mechanics or motormans pleasure in a smoothrunning machine. As
the operator gets more mechanized even that disappears; what you get is a
division of life into drudgery and leisure instead of into work and play. As
industrial society evolves and the workers get control of the machines a new
type of craftsmanship may work out. For the present you only get opportunity
for craftsmanship, which ought to be the privilege of any workman, in novelwriting and the painting of easelpictures and in a few of the machinebuilding
trades that are hangovers from the period of individual manufacture that is
just closing. Most of the attempts to salvage craftsmanship in industry have
been faddy movements like East Aurora and Morris furniture and have come

Books

21

to nothing. A Farewell to Arms is no worse a novel because it was written with

a typewriter. But its a magnificent novel because the writer felt every minute
the satisfaction of working ably with his material and his tools and continually pushing the work to the limit of effort.

H . L . M encken

Fiction by Adept Hands

r. Hemingways Farewell to Arms is a study of the disintegration

of two youngsters under the impact of war. The man, Frederic Henry, is a
young American architect, turned into a lieutenant of the Italian Ambulance; the woman is Catherine Barkley, a Scotch nurse. They meet just
after Catherine has lost her fianc, blown to pieces on the Western front,
and fall into each others arms at once. For six months they dodge about
between Milan and the Italian front, carrying on their affair under vast
technical difficulties. Henry is badly wounded; the Italians, broken, retreat
in a panic; earth and sky are full of blood and flames. Finally a baby is
on its way, and the pair escape to Switzerland. There Catherine dies in
childbirth, and Henry wanders into space. It was like saying good-bye to
a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to
the hotel in the rain.
The virtue of the story lies in its brilliant evocation of the horrible squalor and confusion of warspecifically of war la Italienne. The thing has all
the blinding color of a Kiralfy spectacle.1 And the people who move through
it, seen fleetingly in the glare, are often almost appallingly real. But Henry
and Catherine, it seems to me, are always a shade less real than the rest. The
more they are accounted for, the less accountable they become. In the end
they fade into mere wraiths, and in the last scenes they scarcely seem human
The American Mercury (January 1930): p. 127.

23

24

H. L. Mencken

at all. Mr. Hemingways dialogue, as always, is fresh and vivid. Otherwise,

his tricks begin to wear thin. The mounting incoherence of a drunken scene
is effective once, but not three or four times. And there is surely no need to
write such vile English as this: The last mile or two of the new road, where it
started to level out, would be able to be shelled steadily by the Austrians.

No t e
1. Imre Kiralfy (18451919), author and organizer of international
exhibitions.

F ord M adox F ord

Ford Madox Ford on the Opening

This excerpt is from the introduction to the Modern Library edition of A

Farewell to Arms by British novelist Ford Madox Ford, the author of The
Good Soldier (1927).

experienced a singular sensation on reading the first sentence of A Farewell to Arms. There are sensations you cannot describe. You may know what
causes them but you cannot tell what portions of your mind they affect nor
yet, possibly, what parts of your physical entity. I can only say that it was as
if I had found at last again something shining after a long delving amongst
dust. I daresay prospectors after gold or diamonds feel something like that.
But theirs can hardly be so coldly clear an emotion, or one so impersonal.
The three impeccable writers of English prose that I have come across in fifty
years or so of reading in search of English prose have been Joseph Conrad,
W. H. Hudson . . . and Ernest Hemingway. . . . Impeccable each after his
kind! I remember with equal clarity and equal indefinableness my sensation
on first reading a sentence of each. With the Conrad it was like being overwhelmed by a great, unhastening wave. With the Hudson it was like lying
on ones back and looking up into a clear, still sky. With the Hemingway it
was just excitement. Like waiting at the side of a coppice, when foxhunting,
for the hounds to break cover. One was going on a long chase in dry clear
weather, one did not know in what direction or over what country.

Introduction, in A Farewell to Arms (New York: Random House, 1932): pp. ix, xviiixx.
Copyright Random House.

25

26

Ford Madox Ford

In the last paragraph I have explained the nature of my emotion when I

read a year or so ago that first sentence of Farewell to Arms. It was more than
excitement. It was excitement plus reassurance. The sentence was exactly the
right opening for a long piece of work. To read it was like looking at an athlete setting out on a difficult and prolonged effort. You say, at the first movement of the limbs: Its all right. Hes in form. . . . Hell do today what he has
never quite done before. And you settle luxuriantly into your seat.
So I read on after the first sentence:
In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders dry and
white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and
blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road
and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The
trunks of the trees were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and
we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and
the leaves, stirred by the breeze falling and the soldiers marching
and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

I wish I could quote more, it is such pleasure to see words like that come
from ones pen. But you can read it for yourself.
A Farewell to Arms is a book important in the annals of the art of writing
because it proves that Hemingway, the writer of short, perfect episodes, can
keep up the pace through a volume. There have been other writers of impeccableof matchlessprose but as a rule their sustained efforts have palled
because precisely of the remarkableness of the prose itself. You can hardly
read Marius the Epicurean. You may applaud its author, Walter Pater. But
Farewell to Arms is without purple patches or even verbal felicities. Whilst
you are reading it you forget to applaud its author. You do not know that you
are having to do with an author. You are living.
A Farewell to Arms is a book that unites the critic to the simple. You
could read it and be thrilled if you had never read a bookor if you had read
and measured all the good books in the world. That is the real province of the
art of writing.
Hemingway has other fields to conquer. That is no censure on A Farewell
to Arms. It is not blaming the United States to say that she has not yet annexed Nicaragua. But whatever he does can never take away from the fresh
radiance of this work. It may close with tears but it is like a spring morning.

R obert P enn Warren

The Story Behind the Love Story

Early in his essay, Warren notes the importance of Hemingways notion of a

code.

e have said that the shadow of ruin is behind the typical Hemingway situation. The typical character faces defeat or death. But out of
defeat or death the character usually manages to salvage something.
And here we discover Hemingways special interest in such situations
and such characters. His heroes are not defeated except upon their own
terms. They are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards, and
when they confront defeat they realize that the stance they take, the stoic
endurance, the stiff upper lip mean a kind of victory. Defeated upon their
own terms, some of them have even courted their defeat; and certainly
they have maintained, even in the practical defeat, an ideal of themselves,
some definition of how a man should behave, formulated or unformulated, by which they have lived. They represent some notion of a code, some
notion of honor, which makes a man a man, and which distinguishes him
from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by
consequence, messy.
***

Hemingway, The Kenyon Review, Volume 9 (Winter 1947): pp. 23, 4, 1824. Copyright
1947 The Kenyon Review.

27

28

Robert Penn Warren

For Hemingway, it is the discipline of the code which makes man human, a sense
of style or good form; it can give meaning, partially at least, to the confusions
of living:
. . . the code and the discipline are important because they can
give meaning to life which otherwise seems to have no meaning
or justification. In other words, in a world without supernatural
sanctions, in the God-abandoned world of modernity, man can
realize an ideal meaning only in so far as he can define and
maintain the code. The effort to define and maintain the code,
however limited and imperfect it may be, is the characteristically
human effort and provides the tragic or pitiful human story.

***
In A Farewell to Arms there is an attempt to make the relationship of love take
on a religious significance in so far as it can give meaning to life.
A Farewell to Arms is a love story. It is a compelling story at the merely
personal level, but is much more compelling and significant when we see
the figures of the lovers silhouetted against the flame-streaked blackness
of war, of a collapsing world, of nada. For there is a story behind the love
story. That story is the quest for meaning and certitude in a world which
seems to offer nothing of the sort. It is, in a sense, a religious book; if it
does not offer a religious solution it is nevertheless conditioned by the
religious problem.
The very first scene of the book, though seemingly casual, is important
if we are to understand the deeper motivations of the story. It is the scene at
the officers mess where the captain baits the priest. Priest every night five
against one, the captain explains to Frederick. But Frederick, we see in this
and later scenes, takes no part in the baiting. There is a bond between him and
the priest, a bond which they both recognize. This becomes clear when, after
the officers have advised Frederick where he should go on his leave to find the
best girls, the priest turns to him and says that he would like for him to go to
Abruzzi, his own province:
There is good hunting. You would like the people and though
it is cold it is clear and dry. You could stay with my family. My
father is a famous hunter.
Come on, said the captain. We go whorehouse before it
shuts.
Goodnight, I said to the priest.
Goodnight, he said.

The Story Behind the Love Story

29

In the preliminary contrast between the officers, who invite the hero to
go to the brothels, and the priest, who invites him to go to the cold, clear, dry
country, we have in its simplest form the issue of the novel.
Frederick does go with the officers that night, and on his leave he does
go to the cities, to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and
you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you
knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and
not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so
exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night,
sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Frederick at the opening
of the novel lives in the world of random and meaningless appetite, knowing
that it is all and all and all, or thinking that he knows that. But behind that
there is a dissatisfaction and disgust. Upon his return from his leave, sitting
in the officers mess, he tries to tell the priest how he is sorry that he had not
gone to the clear, cold, dry countrythe priests home, which takes on the
shadowy symbolic significance of another kind of life, another view of the
world. The priest had always known that other country.
He had always known what I did not know and what, when
I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that
then, although I learned it later.

What Frederick learns later is the story behind the love story of the book.
But this theme is not merely stated at the opening of the novel and then
absorbed into the action. It appears later, at crucial points, to define the line of
meaning in the action. When, for example, Frederick is wounded, the priest
visits him in the hospital. Their conversation makes even plainer the religious
background of the novel. The priest has said that he would like to go back
after the war to the Abruzzi. He continues:
It does not matter. But there in my country it is understood
that a man may love God. It is not a dirty joke.
I understand.
He looked at me and smiled.
You understand but you do not love God.
No.
You do not love him at all? he asked.
I am afraid of him in the night sometimes.
You should love Him.
I dont love much.
Yes, he said. You do. What you tell me about in the nights.
That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love

30

Robert Penn Warren

you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to
serve.
I dont love.
You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy.

We have here two items of importance. First, there is the definition of

Frederick as the sleepless man, the man haunted by nada. Second, at this stage
in the novel, the end of Book I, the true meaning of the love story with Catherine has not yet been defined. It is still at the level of appetite. The priests
role is to indicate the next stage of the story, the discovery of the true nature
of love, the wish to do things for. And he accomplishes this by indicating a parallel between secular love and Divine love, a parallel which implies
Fredericks quest for meaning and certitude. And to emphasize further this
idea, Frederick, after the priest leaves, muses on the high, clean country of the
Abruzzi, the priests home which has already been endowed with the symbolic significance of the religious view of the world.
In the middle of Book II (Chapter xviii), in which the love story begins
to take on the significance which the priest had predicted, the point is indicated by a bit of dialogue between the lovers.
Couldnt we be married privately some way? Then if anything
happened to me or if you had a child.
Theres no way to be married except by church or state. We
are married privately. You see, darling, it would mean everything
to me if I had any religion. But I havent any religion.
You gave me the Saint Anthony.
That was for luck. Some one gave it to me.
Then nothing worries you?
Only being sent away from you. Youre my religion. Youre all
Ive got.

Again, toward the end of Book IV (Chapter xxxv), just before Frederick
and Catherine make their escape into Switzerland, Frederick is talking with a
friend, the old Count Greffi, who has just said that he thought H. G. Wellss
novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through a very good study of the English middleclass soul. But Frederick twists the word soul into another meaning.
I dont know about the soul.
Poor boy. We none of us know about the soul. Are you
Croyant?
At night.

The Story Behind the Love Story

31

Later in the same conversation the Count returns to the topic:

And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am
asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to become
devout myself but it has not come. I thought he smiled sadly but
I could not tell. He was so old and his face was very wrinkled, so
that a smile used so many lines that all graduations were lost.
I might become very devout, I said. Anyway, I will pray for
you.
I had always expected to become devout. All my family died
very devout. But somehow it does not come.
Its too early.
Maybe it is too late. Perhaps I have outlived my religious
feeling.
My own comes only at night.
Then too you are in love. Do not forget that is a religious
feeling.

So here, again, we find Frederick defined as the sleepless man, and the
relation established between secular love and Divine love.
In the end, with the death of Catherine, Frederick discovers that the
attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of
the personal relationship is doomed to failure. It is doomed because it is liable
to all the accidents of a world in which human beings are like the ants running back and forth on a log burning in a campfire and in which death is, as
Catherine says immediately before her own death, just a dirty trick. But this
is not to deny the value of the effort, or to deny the value of the discipline, the
code, the stoic endurance, the things which make it trueor half truethat
nothing ever happens to the brave.
This question of the characteristic discipline takes us back to the beginning of the book, and to the context from which Fredericks effort arises. We
have already mentioned the contrast between the officers of the mess and the
priest. It is a contrast based on the man who is aware of the issue of meaning
in life and those who are unaware of it, who give themselves over to the mere
flow of accident, the contrast between the disciplined and the undisciplined.
But the contrast is not merely between the priest and the officers. Fredericks
friend, the surgeon Rinaldi, is another who is on the same side of the contrast
as the priest. He may go to the brothel with his brother officers, he may even
bait the priest a little, but his personal relationship with Frederick indicates
his affiliations; he is one of the initiate. Furthermore, he has the discipline of
his profession, and as we have seen, in the Hemingway world, the discipline
which seems to be merely technical, the style of the artist or the form of the

32

Robert Penn Warren

athlete or bull fighter, may be an index to a moral value. Already, he says, I

am only happy when I am working. (Already because the seeking of pleasure
in sensation is inadequate for Rinaldi.) This point appears more sharply in the
remarks about the doctor who first attends to Fredericks wounded leg. He is
incompetent and does not wish to take the responsibility for a decision.
Before he came back three doctors came into the room. I have
noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a
tendency to seek one anothers company and aid in consultation.
A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will
recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your
tonsils with success. These were three such doctors.

In contrast with them there is Dr. Valentini, who is competent, who is

willing to take responsibility, and who, as a kind of mark of his role, speaks
the same lingo, with the same bantering, ironical tone, as Rinaldithe tone
which is the mark of the initiate.
So we have the world of the novel divided into two groups, the initiate and the uninitiate, the aware and the unaware, the disciplined and the
undisciplined. In the first group are Frederick, Catherine, Rinaldi, Valentini,
Count Greffi, the old man who cut the paper silhouettes for pleasure, and
Passini, Manera, and the other ambulance men in Fredericks command. In
the second group are the officers of the mess, the incompetent doctors, the
legitimate hero Ettore, and the patriotsall the people who do not know
what is really at stake, who are decided by the big words, who do not have the
discipline. They are the messy people, the people who surrender to the flow
and illusion of things. It is this second group who provide the context of the
novel, and more especially the context from which Frederick moves toward
his final complete awareness.
The final awareness means, as we have said, that the individual is thrown
back upon his private discipline and his private capacity to endure. The hero
cuts himself off from the herd, the confused world, which symbolically appears as the routed army at Caporetto. And, as Malcolm Cowley has pointed
out, the plunge into the flooded Tagliamento, when Frederick escapes from
the battle police, has the significance of a rite. By this baptism Frederick is
reborn into another world; he comes out into the world of the man alone, no
longer supported by and involved in society.
Anger was washed away in the river along with my obligation.
Although that ceased when the carabiniere put his hands on my
collar. I would like to have had the uniform off although I did
not care much about the outward forms. I had taken off the stars,

The Story Behind the Love Story

33

but that was for convenience. It was no point of honor. I was not
against them. I was through. I wished them all the luck. There
were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and
the sensible ones, and they deserved it. But it was not my show any
more and I wished this bloody train would get to Maestre and I
would eat and stop thinking.

So Frederick, by a decision, does what the boy Nick, in In Our Time,

does as the result of the accident of a wound. He makes a separate peace.
And from the waters of the flooded Tagliamento arises the Hemingway hero
in his purest form, with human history and obligation washed away, ready to
enact the last phase of his appropriate drama, and learn from his inevitable
defeat the lesson of lonely fortitude.

C arlos B aker

The Mountain and the Plain

Learn about the human heart and the human mind in war from this
book.
Hemingway, in another connection 1

I. Landscape in Gorizia
he opening chapter of Hemingways second novel, A Farewell to Arms,
is a generically rendered landscape with thousands of moving figures. It
does much more than start the book. It helps to establish the dominant
mood (which is one of doom), plants a series of important images for future
symbolic cultivation, and subtly compels the reader into the position of
detached observer.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village
that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In
the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and
white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving
and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down
the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the
trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell
early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road

In Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956): pp.
94116. Copyright 1956 Princeton University Press.

35

36

Carlos Baker

and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and
the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white,
except for the leaves.

The first sentence here fixes the reader in a house in the village where he
can take a long view across the river and the plain to the distant mountains.
Although he does not realize it yet, the plain and the mountains (not to mention the river and the trees, the dust and the leaves) have a fundamental value
as symbols. The autumnal tone of the language is important in establishing
the autumnal mood of the chapter. The landscape itself has the further importance of serving as a general setting for the whole first part of the novel.
Under these values, and of basic structural importance, are the elemental images which compose this remarkable introductory chapter.
The second sentence, which draws attention from the mountainous
background to the bed of the river in the middle distance, produces a sense
of clearness, dryness, whiteness, and sunniness which is to grow very subtly
under the artists hands until it merges with one of the novels two dominant
symbols, the mountainimage. The other major symbol is the plain. Throughout the substructure of the book it is opposed to the mountain image. Down
this plain the river flows. Across it, on the dusty road among the trees, pass the
men-at-war, faceless and voiceless and unidentified against the background
of the spreading plain.
In the third and fourth sentences of this beautifully managed paragraph
the march-past of troops and vehicles begins. From the readers elevated
vantage-point, looking down on the plain, the river, and the road, the continuously parading men are reduced in size and scalemade to seem smaller,
more pitiful, more pathetic, more like wraiths blown down the wind, than
would be true if the reader were brought close enough to overhear their conversation or see them as individualized personalities.
Between the first and fourth sentences, moreover, Hemingway accomplishes the transition from late summer to autumnan inexorability of seasonal change which prepares the way for the study in doom on which he is
embarked. Here again the natural elements take on symbolic function. In the
late summer we have the dust, in the early autumn the dust and the leaves
falling; and through them both the marching troops impersonally seen. The
reminder, through the dust, of the words of the funeral service in the prayerbook is fortified by the second natural symbol, the falling leaves. They dry out,
fall, decay, and become part of the dust. Into the dust is where the troops are
goingsome of them soon, all of them eventually.
The short first chapter closes with winter, and the establishment of rain
as a symbol of disaster. At the start of the winter came the permanent rain
and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only

The Mountain and the Plain

37

seven thousand died of it in the army. Already, now in the winter, seven
thousand of the wraiths have vanished underground. The permanent rain
lays the dust and rots the leaves as if they had never existed. There is no
excellent beauty, even in the country around Gorizia, that has not some sadness to it. And there is hardly a natural beauty in the whole first chapter of
A Farewell to Arms which has not some symbolic function in Hemingways
first study in doom.
II. Not in Our Stars
To call A Farewell to Arms a first study in doom might seem unfair to The
Sun Also Rises. But the total effect of the first novel, whatever its authors
intention, is closer to that of tragicomedy than of tragedy. The tragic sense
of life exists in the undertones of The Sun Also Rises. Its surface tone is,
however, somewhere within the broad range of the comic. Reading it, one
is oftener reminded of the tragicomic irony of a work like Chaucers Troilus
and Criseyde than, say, the tragic irony of the Greeks and the Elizabethans.
The operation of pityagain as in Chauceris carefully equivocal, somehow in itself a phase of irony, and under a restraint so nearly complete that
it can scarcely move. Possibly because of the nature of the material, possibly
because of the cultivated habit of understatement, one does not find in The
Sun Also Rises the degree of emotional commitment which becomes visible
in A Farewell to Arms.
After the experience of writing and revising his first novel, Hemingway
worked more wisely and more slowly on his second. The preparation of the
first draft took six months instead of six weeks. It was begun in Paris about
the first of March, 1928. Through the spring and summer the work went on
in Key West, where Hemingway made himself relax by deep-sea fishing while
writing some 40,000 words. He continued the draft in Piggott, Arkansas, and
Kansas City, Missouri, where he ran the total number of words to something
like 87,000. The book was completed in preliminary form near Big Horn, in
Sheridan County, Wyoming, about the end of August, 1928.
Following a brief interlude, he began revision, an extremely painstaking
job of cutting and rewriting which filled another five months. On January
22, 1929, he wrote Perkins that the final draft stood complete in typescript,
and by midFebruary it had been decided to serialize the book in Scribners
Magazine, beginning with the number of May, 1929. Still Hemingway was
dissatisfied. In Paris during the spring he continued to labor over the galleyproofs of the magazine version, rewriting some portions and keeping them
by him until the last possible moment. Book-proof reached him in Paris on
June 5, 1929.2 By the twenty-fourth, when he had finally satisfied himself
that everything possible had been done, he was able to report to Perkins that
he had at last achieved a new and much better ending for his novel. There is

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Carlos Baker

a persistent tradition that the present ending was rewritten seventeen times
before Hemingway got the corrected galley-proof aboard the boat-train.
In the midst of life, runs the Book of Common Prayer, we are in death.
During the time I was writing the first draft said Hemingway in 1948, my
second son Patrick was delivered in Kansas City by Caesarean section, and
while I was re-writing my father killed himself in Oak Park, Illinois. . . . I
remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the
fine times and the bad times we had in that year. But much more vividly I
remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day.
Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been. Each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was
still going good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact that the
book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was
a tragedy and knew it could only have one end. But finding you were able to
make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read
it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater
pleasure . . . than any I had ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered.3
The appearance of A Farewell to Arms in book form on September 27,
1929, marked the inception of Hemingways still lengthening career as one of
the very few great tragic writers in twentieth-century fiction. His next book,
Death in the Afternoon, furthered his exploration into the esthetics of tragedy.
Through the 1930s he continued at intervals to wrestle with the problem. To
Have and Have Not (though with limited success) examined the tragic implications of social and political decay. For Whom the Bell Tolls attacked a similar
problem on an epic and international scale. Ten years after that, at the age of
fifty, Hemingway rounded out a full twenty years of work in tragedy with his
character-study of Colonel Richard Cantwell.
The position occupied by A Farewell to Arms among Hemingways tragic
writings may be suggested by the fact that he once referred to the story of
Lieutenant Frederick [sic] Henry and Catherine Barkley as his Romeo and
Juliet.4 The most obvious parallel is that Henry and Catherine, like their Elizabethan prototypes, might be seen as star-crossed lovers. Hemingway might
also have been thinking of how rapidly Romeo and Juliet, whose affair has
begun as a mere flirtation, pass over into the status of relatively mature lovers.
In the third place, he may have meant to imply that his own lovers, caught in
the tragic pattern of the war on the Austrian-Italian front, are not far different
from the young victims of the Montague-Capulet family feud.
Neither in Romeo and Juliet nor in A Farewell to Arms is the catastrophe
a direct and logical result of the immoral social situation. Catherines bodily
structure, which precludes a normal delivery for her baby, is an unfortunate
biological accident. The death of Shakespeares lovers is also precipitated by

The Mountain and the Plain

39

an accidentthe detention of the messagebearing friar. The student of esthetics, recognizing another kind of logic in art than that of mathematical
cause-and-effect, may however conclude that Catherines death, like that of
Juliet, shows a kind of artistic inevitability. Except by a large indirection, the
war does not kill Catherine any more than the Veronese feud kills Juliet. But
in the emotional experience of the novel, Catherines dying is directly associated and interwoven with the whole tragic pattern of fatigue and suffering,
loneliness, defeat and doom, of which the war is itself the broad social manifestation. And one might make a similar argument about Romeo and Juliet.
In application to Frederick and Catherine, the phrase star-crossed lovers needs some qualification. It does not mean that they are the victims of
an actual malevolent metaphysical power. All their crises are caused by forces
which human human beings have set in motion. During Fredericks understandably bitter ruminations while Catherine lies dying in the Lausanne hospital, fatalistic thoughts do, quite naturally, cross his mind. But he does not, in
the end, blame anything called Fate for Catherines death. The pain of her
labor reminds him that her pregnancy has been comfortable and apparently
normal; the present biological struggle is perhaps a way of evening things up.
So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything. But he
immediately rejects his own inference: that is, that her sufferings in labor are a
punishment for sinful pleasures. Scientifically considered, the child is simply
a by-product of good nights in Milanand there is never a pretence that they
were not good. The parents do not happen to be formally married; still, the
pain of the child-bearing would have been just as it is even if they had been
married fifty times. In short, the pain is natural, inevitable, and without either
moral or metaphysical significance. The anonymous they is nothing but a
name for the way things are.
A little later Frederick Henry bitterly compares the human predicament
first to a game and then to a swarm of ants on a log in a campfire. Both are
homely and unbookish metaphors such as would naturally occur to any young
American male at a comparable time. Living now seems to be a war-like
game, played for keeps, where to be tagged out is to die. Here again, there
is a moral implication in the idea of being caught off basetrying to steal
third, say, when the infield situation and the number of outs make it wiser to
stay on second. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time
they caught you off base they killed you. One trouble, of course, is that the
player rarely has time enough to learn by long experience; his fatal error may
come in the second half of the first inning, which is about as far as Catherine
seems likely to go. Even those who survive long enough to learn the rules
may be killed through the operation of chance or the accidents of the game.
Death may, in short, come gratuitously without the slightest reference to
the rules.

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Carlos Baker

It is plainly a gratuitous death which comes to the ants on the burning

log in Fredericks remembered campfire. Some immediately die in flame, as
Catherine is now dying. Others, like Lieutenant Henry, who has survived a
trench-mortar explosion, will manage to get away, their bodies permanently
scarred, their future course uncertainexcept that they will die in the end.
Still others, unharmed, will swarm on the still cool end of the log until the
fire at last reaches them. If a Hardyan President of the Immortals takes any
notice of them, He does little enough for their relief. He is like Frederick
Henry pouring water on the burning campfire lognot to save the ants but
only to empty a cup.
Catherines suffering and death prove nothing except that she should
not have become pregnant. But she had to become pregnant in order to find
out that becoming pregnant was unwise. Death is a penalty for ignorance of
the rules: it is also a fact which has nothing to do with rule or reason. Death
is the fire which, in conclusion, burns us all, and it may singe us along the way.
Frederick Henrys ruminations simply go to show that if he and Catherine
seem star-crossed, it is only because Catherine is biologically double-crossed,
Europe is is war-crossed, and life is death-crossed. 5
III. Home and Not-Home
As its first chapter suggests, the natural-mythological structure which
informs A Farewell to Arms is in some ways comparable to the BurgueteMontparnasse, Catholic-Pagan, and Romero-Cohn contrasts of The Sun
Also Rises. One has the impression, however, of greater assurance, subtlety,
and complexity in the second novel, as if the writing of the first had
strengthened and consolidated Hemingways powers and given him new
insights into this method for controlling materials from below.
Despite the insistent, denotative matter-of-factness at the surface of
the presentation, the subsurface activity of A Farewell to Arms is organized
connotatively around two poles. By a process of accrual and coagulation,
the images tend to build round the opposed concepts of Home and NotHome. Neither, of course, is truly conceptualistic; each is a kind of poetic
intuition, charged with emotional values and woven, like a cable, of many
strands. The Home-concept, for example, is associated with the mountains;
with dry-cold weather; with peace and quiet; with love, dignity, health, happiness, and the good life; and with worship or at least the consciousness of
God. The Not-Home concept is associated with low-lying plains; with rain
and fog; with obscenity, indignity, disease, suffering, nervousness, war and
death; and with irreligion.
The motto of William Birds Three Mountains Press in Paris, which
printed Hemingways in our time, was Levavi oculos meos in montes. The
line might also have served as an epigraph for A Farewell to Arms. Merely

The Mountain and the Plain

41

introduced in the first sentence of the first chapter, the mountain-image

begins to develop important associations as early as Chapter Two. Learning
that Frederick Henry is to go on leave, the young priest urges him to visit
Capracotta in the Abruzzi. There, he says, is good hunting. You would like
the people and though it is cold, it is clear and dry. You could stay with my
family. My father is a famous hunter. But the lowlander infantry captain
interrupts: Come on, he says in pidgin Italian to Frederick Henry. We go
whorehouse before it shuts. 6
After Henrys return from the leave, during which he has been almost
everywhere else on the Italian peninsula except Abruzzi, the mountain-image
gets further backing from another low-land contrast. I had wanted, says
he, to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen
and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and
powdery and haretracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and
called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but
to the smoke of cafs and nights when the room whirled and you needed to
look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that
that was all there was.
Throughout Book I, Hemingway quietly consolidates the mountainimage. On the way up towards the Isonzo from Gorizia, Frederick looks
across the river and the plain towards the Julian and Carnic Alps. I looked
to the north at the two ranges of mountains, green and dark to the snowline
and then white and lovely in the sun. Then, as the road mounted along the
ridge, I saw a third range of mountains, higher snow mountains, that looked
chalky white and furrowed, with strange planes, and then there were mountains far off beyond all these, that you could hardly tell if you really saw.7
Like Pope in the celebrated Alps on Alps arise passage, Hemingway is using
the mountains symbolically. Years later, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, he
would use the mighty peak of East Africa as a natural image of immortality,
just as in The Green Hills of Africa he would build his narrative in part upon
a contrast between the hill-country and the Serengetti Plain. When Frederick Henry lowers his eyes from the far-off ranges, he sees the plain and the
river, the war-making equipment, and the broken houses of the little town
which is to be occupied, if anything is left of it to occupy, in the coming attack. Already now, a few dozen pages into the book, the mountain-image
has developed associations: with the man of God and his homeland, with
clear dry cold and snow, with polite and kindly people, with hospitality and
with natural beauty. Already it has its oppositions: the lowland obscenities of
the priest-baiting captain, cheap cafs, one-night prostitutes, drunkenness,
destruction, and the war.
When the trench-mortar explosion nearly kills Henry, the priest comes to
visit him in the field-hospital, and the Abruzzi homeland acquires a religious

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Carlos Baker

association. There in my country, says the priest, it is understood that a man

may love God. It is not a dirty joke. Repeating, for emphasis, the effect of the
priests first account of the highland country, Hemingway allows Frederick to
develop in his minds eye an idyllic picture of the priests home-ground.
At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream
below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night . . .
because it was bad for the girls to hear. . . . Aquila was a fine town.
It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was
the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to
go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good
because they fed on grapes, and you never took a lunch because
the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them in
their houses. . . . 8

By the close of Book I, largely through the agency of the priest, a complex connection has come clear between the idea of Home and the combination of high ground, cold weather, love, and the love of God. Throughout,
Hemingway has worked by suggestion, implication, and quiet repetition, putting the reader into potential awareness, readying him for what is to come.
The next step is to bring Catherine Barkley by degrees into the center
of the image. Her love affair with Henry begins as a rotten game of wartime seduction. Still emotionally unstable and at loose nervous ends from her
fiancs death, Catherine is a comparatively easy conquest. But in the American hospital at Milan, following Henrys ordeal by fire at the front not far
from the Isonzo, the casual affair becomes an honorable though unpriested
marriage. Because she can make a home of any room she occupiesand
Henry several times alludes to this power of hersCatherine naturally moves
into association with ideas of home, love, happiness. But she does not reach
the center of the mountain-image until, on the heels of Fredericks harrowing lowland experiences during the retreat from Caporetto, the lovers move
to Switzerland. Catherine is the first to go, and Henry follows her there as
if she were the genius of the mountains, beckoning him on. Soon they are
settled into a supremely happy life in the winterland on the mountainside
above Montreux. Catherines death occurs at Lausanne, after the March rains
and the approaching need for a good lyingin hospital have driven the young
couple down from their magic mountainthe closest approach to the priests
fair homeland in the Abruzzi that they are ever to know.
The total structure of the novel is developed, in fact, around the series of
contrasting situations already outlined. To Gorizia, the Not-Home of war, succeeds the Home which Catherine and Frederick make together in the Milan
hospital. The NotHome of the grim retreat from the Isonzo is followed by the

The Mountain and the Plain

43

quiet and happy retreat which the lovers share above Montreux. Home ends for
Frederick Henry when he leaves Catherine dead in the Lausanne Hospital.
The total structure of the novel is developed, in fact, around the series
of contrasting situations already outlined. To Gorizia, the Not-Home of
war, succeeds the Home which Catherine and Frederick make together in
the Milan Hospital. The Not-Home of the grim retreat from the Isonzo
is followed by the quiet and happy retreat which the lovers share above
Montreux. Home ends for Frederick Henry when he leaves Catherine dead
in the Lausanne Hospital.
Developed for an esthetic purpose, Hemingways contrasting images
have also a moral value. Although he has nothing to say about the images
themselves, Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn is undoubtedly correct in saying that A
Farewell to Arms proves once again the ultimate identity of the moral and
the esthetic. In this critics view, Hemingway transcended the moral nihilism of the school he had himself helped to form by the very intensity of his
feelings for the contrast of love and war. The simply wrought fable, Lewisohn continues, ignoring all the symbolic complexities yet still making a just
appraisal, has two culminationsthe laconic and terrible one in which the
activity of the battle police brings to an end the epically delineated retreat of
the Italian army with its classically curbed rages and pity . . . and that other
and final culmination in Switzerland with its blending in so simple and moving a fashion of the eternal notes of love and death. The opperation of the
underlying imagery, once its purposes are understood, doubly underscores
Mr. Lewisohns point that there is no moral nihilism in the central story of A
Farewell to Arms. 9
The use of rain as a kind of symbolic obligato in the novel has
been widely and properly admired. Less apparent to the cursory reader is the way in which the whole idea of climate is related to the naturalmythological structure. (Hemingways clusters of associated images produce
emotional climates also, but they are better experienced than reduced by
critical descriptions.) The rains begin in Italy during October, just before
Henrys return to Gorizia after his recovery from his wounds. The rains continue, at first steadily, then intermittently, throughout the disastrous retreat,
Henrys flight to Stresa, and the time of his reunion with Catherine. When
they awaken the morning after their reunion night, the rain has stopped, light
floods the window, and Henry, looking out in the fresh early morning, can
see Lake Maggiore in the sun with the mountains beyond. Towards those
mountains the lovers now depart.
Not until they are settled in idyllic hibernation in their rented chalet
above Montreux are they really out of the rain. As if to emphasize by climatic
accompaniment their confused alarms of struggle and flight, the rain has
swept over them during their escape up the lake in an open boat. Once in

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Carlos Baker

the mountains, however, they are out of the lowlands, out of danger, out of
the huge, tired debacle of the war. Above Montreux, as in the priests homeland of Abruzzi, the ridges are iron-hard with the frost. The deep snow
isolates them, and gives them a feeling of domestic safety, tranquillity, and
invulnerability.
For several months the rainless idyll continues. We lived through the
months of January and February and the winter was very fine and we were
very happy. There had been short thaws when the wind blew warm and the
snow softened and the air felt like spring, but always the clear, hard cold had
come again and the winter had returned. In March came the first break in the
winter. In the night it started raining.
The reader has been prepared to recognize some kind of disaster-symbol
in the return of the rains. Much as in Romeo and Juliet, several earlier premonitions of doom have been inserted at intervals. Im afraid of the rain,
says Catherine in the Milan Hospital one summer night, because sometimes
I see me dead in it. In the fall, just before Henry returns to the front, they
are in a Milan hotel. During a break in the conversation the sound of falling
rain comes in. A motor car klaxons, and Henry quotes Marvell: At my back I
always hear Times wingd chariot hurrying near. He must soon take a cab to
catch the train that will project him, though he does not know it yet, into the
disaster of the great retreat. Months later, in Lausanne, the Marvell lines echo
hollowly: We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling
as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together.
(Italics added.) The sound of the rain continues like an undersong until, with
Catherine dead in the hospital room (not unlike that other happy one where
their child was conceived), Henry walks back to the hotel in the rain. 10
One further reinforcement of the central symbolic structure is provided
by the contrast between the priest and the doctor, the man of God and the
man without God. In line with the reminiscence of Romeo and Juliet, it may
not be fantastic to see them respectively as the Friar Lawrence and the Mercutio of Hemingways novel. The marked contrast between the two men becomes especially apparent when Henry returns to the Gorizia area following
his discharge from the hospital.
The return to Gorizia is a sharp comedown. After the home-feeling of
the hospital and the hotel in Milan, the old army post seems less like home
than ever. The tenor of life there has noticeably changed. A kind of damp-rot
afflicts morale. The major, bringing Henry up to date on the state of affairs,
plays dismally on the word bad. It has been a bad summer. It was very bad
on the Bainsizza plateau: We lost three cars. . . . You wouldnt believe how
bad its been. . . . You were lucky to be hit when you were. . . . Next year will
be worse. . . . As if he were not fully convinced by the Majors despair, Henry

The Mountain and the Plain

45

picks up the word: Is it so bad? The answer is yes. It is so bad and worse. Go
get cleaned up and find your friend Rinaldi.
With Rinaldi the doctor, things also are bad, a fact which has been borne
in upon the major so strongly that he thinks of Rinaldi when he mentions the
word bad. Things are not bad for Rinaldi from a professional point of view, for
he has operated on so many casualties that he has become a lovely surgeon.
Still, he is not the old Mercutio-like and mercurial Rinaldi. If mercury enters
into his picture at all it is because he has syphilis, or thinks he has. He is treating himself for it and is beginning to entertain certain delusions of persecution. Except for his work, and the temporary opiates of drink and prostitutes,
both of which interfere with his work, Rinaldi, the man of the plain, the man
without God, is a man without resources.
With the priest, the man from the Abruzzi highlands, tacitly reintroduced as a contrast for Rinaldi, things are not so bad. He was the same as
ever, says Henry at their meeting, small and brown and compactlooking.
He is much more sure of himself than formerly, though in a modest way.
When Rinaldi, in the absence of the foul-mouthed captain, takes up the former indoor game of priest-baiting, the priest is not perturbed. I could see,
says Henry, that the baiting did not touch him now.
Out of the evils of the past summer the priest has even contrived to
gather a nascent hope. Officers and men, he thinks, are gentling down because they realize the war as never before. When this happens, the fighting cannot continue for very much longer. Henry, playing half-heartedly the
advocatus diaboli, argues that what the priest calls gentling down is really
nothing but the feeling of defeat: It is in defeat that we become Christian
. . . like Our Lord. Henry is maintaining that after the fearless courage of
His ministry, Our Lords gentleness and His refusal to fight against the full
brunt of the experience on Calvary became the ideal of Christian meekness.
If Peter had rescued Christ Jesus from the Garden, suggests Henry, Christian
ethics might be something different. But the priest, who is as compact as he
looks, knows otherwise. Our Lord would not have changed in any way. From
that knowledge and belief comes the priests own strength. He has resources
which Dr. Rinaldi, the man without God, does not possess. 11
The priest-doctor contrast is carried out in the sacred-versus-profanelove antithesis which is quietly emphasized in the novel. Through the agency
of Rinaldi the love affair begins at a fairly low level. The doctor introduces
Frederick to Catherine, and takes a jocularly profane view of the early infatuation, seeming to doubt that it can ever be anything but an unvarnished
wartime seduction. On the other hand, the background symbols of home
and true love and high ground suggest that the lovers idyllic life in Switzerland is carried on under the spiritual aegis of the priest. Neither Rinaldi
nor the priest appears in the latter part of the book. But when, having been

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Carlos Baker

driven to the lowlands by the rains of spring, Catherine enters the hospital,
it is naturally enough a doctor who takes over. And though this doctor does
all he can to save her life, Catherine dies.
Projected in actualistic terms and a matter-of-fact tone, telling the truth
about the effects of war in human life, A Farewell to Arms is entirely and even
exclusively acceptable as a naturalistic narrative of what happened. To read it
only as such, however, is to miss the controlling symbolism: the deep central
antithesis between the image of life and home (the mountain) and the image
of war and death (the plain).
IV. The Female of the Species
Coleridge once made the questionable remark that in Shakespeare it is the
perfection of woman to be characterless. Every one wishes a Desdemona or
Ophelia for a wifecreatures who, though they may not always understand
you, do always feel [for] you and feel with you.12 To make so inordinate
a generalization, Coleridge was obliged to ignore the better than half of
Shakespeares perfect women who are anything but characterless.
The modern reader, brought up on similar generalizations about the
heroines of Hemingway, may wish to reconsider the problem. The most frequent adverse comment on Hemingways fictional heroines is that they tend
to embody two extremes, ignoring the middle ground. This fact is taken to be
a kind of sin of omission, the belief being that most of their real-life sisters
congregate and operate precisely in the area which Hemingway chooses not
to invade at all.
The strictures of Mr. Edmund Wilson may be taken as typical of a recurrent critical position. He puts the argument in terms of a still-to-be-written
chapter on the resemblances between Hemingway and Kipling. The two writers seem to him to share in certain assumptions about society with particular reference to the position of women. Kipling and Hemingway show, says
Mr. Wilson, much the same split attitude toward women. Kipling anticipates
Hemingway in his beliefs that he travels fastest who travels alone and that
the female of the species is more deadly than the male; and Hemingway
seems to reflect Kipling in the submissive infra-Anglo-Saxon women that
make his heroes such perfect mistresses. The most striking example of this is
the amoeba-like little Spanish girl, Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the
docile native wives of English officials in the early stories of Kipling, she lives
only to serve her lord and to merge her identity with his; and this love affair
with a woman in a sleepingbag, lacking completely the kind of give and take
that goes on between real men and women, has the alltooperfect felicity of
a youthful erotic dream. 13
The relevance of this commentary is that it underscores the idea of the
two extremes in Hemingways fictional treatment of women. In one group

The Mountain and the Plain

47

are the deadly females. Their best-realized (because most sympathetically

presented and most roundly characterized) representative is Brett Ashley.
The horrible example would presumably be someone like Margot Macomber,
who is really and literally deadly. In varying degreesand the fact that it is a
matter of degree ought to be noticedthese women are selfish, corrupt, and
predatory. They are bad for the men with whom they are involved. At the
other extreme would stand the allegedly docile and submissive mistresstypes,
of whom Catherine Barkley and Maria are the conspicuous examples. These,
for Mr. Wilson, are incredible wish-projections, youthfully erotic dream-girls,
or impossibly romantic ideals of wife-hood. They bear, it seems, little resemblance to the women with whom one is acquainted. Where now, Mr. Wilson
seems to be asking, are the day-by-day vagaries, the captious bickerings, the
charming or enraging anfractuosities which combine to produce the normal
or real married state? The greater number of the female kind obviously occupy some realm intermediate between the Becky Sharps and the Amelia
Sedleys, between the pole of Goneril and Regan and the pole of Ophelia and
Desdemona. By his failure, or his tacit refusal, to depict realistically the occupants of this realm and to use them as the heroines of his fiction, Hemingway
has somehow failed in his obligation to present things as they are.
This point of view naturally affects Mr. Wilsons judgment of A Farewell
to Arms. On the whole he finds the novel to be a less serious affair than
Hemingways previous work. Catherine Barkley and Frederick Henry, at least
during the period of their Swiss idyll, strike him as not in themselves convincing as human personalities. For him their relationship is merely an idealization, the abstraction of a lyric emotion.14 Mr. Cowley evidently shares
this view. To me, writes Mr. Cowley, [Catherine] is only a woman at the
beginning of the book, in her near madnessas if, perhaps, some degree of
emotional instability were a criterion of credibility in the portrait of a fictional heroine.15
For those who find it hard to accept Mr. Wilsons view of Catherine as
an abstraction and of Maria as an amoeba, four practical points might well be
made. The first has to do with the relation of Brett Ashley and Catherine Barkley to what Mr. Wilson might call the Great Infra-Anglo-Saxon tradition of
fictional heroines. It is of some interest to observe that Mr. Wilsons strictures
on the heroines of Hemingway could be applied with equal justice, not only
to the heroines of Kipling but also to a considerable number of other heroines
throughout the history of English and American fiction. Hemingway shares
with many predecessors an outlook indubitably masculine, a certain chivalric
attitude not without ironic overtones, and a disinclination to interest himself
in what may be called the prosaisms of the female world.
The second point is that through a method of comparative portraiture,
Hemingway carefully establishes a moral norm of womanly behavior. Then,

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Carlos Baker

whether by ethical intent or by temperamental attitude, he uses the established

norm as a means of computing various degrees of departure from it. Depending
on their own views in this area, readers may find Hemingways normwomen
less interesting and less credible than their abnormal cousins. For the inveterate reader of fiction and narrative poetry it is perhaps a psychological truism
that the femme fatale, the general type of the temptress, seems more interesting than the stable heroine.
In the early work of Hemingway the point is well illustrated by the
contrast between Brett and Catherine. There are, to begin with, certain resemblances. Like Brett, Catherine is an Englishwoman; like Brett, she is
beautiful, tall, and blonde. She talks as Brett does, stressing certain words
which in print are italicized. Like Brett, she has lost her own true love early
in the war, and her emotions, like her way of life, have become confused as a
result of the bereavement. But here the resemblances stop.
Bretts neurosis drives her from bar to bar, from man to man, and from
city to city. None of it is any good: her polygamy, with or without benefit
of justices of the peace, leads only to more of the same, as one drink leads
to another in the endless round. Brett is not good for the men she knows.
Romero wants her to let her hair grow out, to become more feminine, to
marry and live with him. The basic abnormality at work in Brett opposes such
feminization. She is the short-haired companion of men, wearing a mans felt
hat, calling herself a chap. She does not really like other women, and neither
has nor wishes to have any real friends among them. She is never happier
than in the Pamplona wineshop, the center of raucous masculine singing, as
if she were a half-woman half in love with damnation.
Catherine Barkley, on the other hand, is all woman. At once dependent
and independent, she halfmothers, halfmistresses Frederick Henry. She
wants no other life than with him, no other man than he. She drinks little
and displays none of Bretts geographical restlessness. She is temperamentally
monogamous. Where she is, home is. Even the red-plush hotel room in Milan (which for several minutes makes her feel like a whore) is changed by her
presence until she herself can feel at home in it. In a little while, says her
lover, the room felt like our own home. My room at the hospital had been
our own home and this room was our home too in the same way. Trying at
first to help her out of the harlotfeeling, Henry kisses her and assures her,
Youre my good girl. Im certainly yours, says Catherine, wryly. But she is
also, and preeminently, a good girleven more so, for example, than Hardys Tess, who was so designated on the title page.16 As if Hemingway were
looking back for contrast to the Circean figure of his first novel, Rinaldi refers
to Catherine as your lovely cool . . . English goddess. But she is a woman,
not a goddess. She rescues, pities, comforts, companions, and sustains, just as
she in turn is rescued from the craziness induced by her lovers death when

The Mountain and the Plain

49

she has finally involved herself sufficiently in Henrys growing love. Her hair
is long; she dresses like a woman and gets on well with other women like her
friend Ferguson. Yet she is evidently happiest alone with her husband. She
would be unhappy and possibly frightened on the wine-cask in Pamplona.
She is at ease in Milan in the midst of a war because she is a young woman in
the midst of love. Like Maria, she is a completing agent for the hero, and is in
turn completed by her association with him. But Brett, on the other hand, is
an agent of depletion, as she herself realizes, and as her unselfish renunciation
of Romero is presumably meant to show.17
The third point to be made about Hemingways heroines is that they
are, on the whole, an aspect of the poetry of things. It is perhaps a sign of
an attitude innately chivalric that they are never written off, as sometimes
happened in Kipling, as mere bundles of rags, bones, and hanks of hair. Even
Margot Macomber, in the bottomless slough of her bitchhood, is seen to be
damned beautiful. The treatment of Catherine, like that of Brett, shows in
Hemingway a fundamental indisposition to render his heroines reductively.
And if one argues that he nowhere seems to commit himself to the emancipation of women, or to become in the usual sense of the term an ardent
feminist, the answer would be, perhaps, that his women are truly emancipated
only through an idea or ideal of service. His heroines, to make the statement
exactly, are meant to show a symbolic or ritualistic function in the service of
the artist and the service of man.
The final point grows naturally out of the preceding ones. It is, in brief,
that all of Hemingways heroines, like all of his heroes, are placed in a special
kind of accelerated world. We do not see them puttering in their kitchens,
but only dreaming of that as a desirable possibility. They are never presented
as harassed mothers; their entire orientation tends to be, in this connection,
premarital. Wars and revolutions, the inevitable enemies of peace and domesticity, set them adrift or destroy their lives. Yet they contrive to embody the
image of home, the idea if not the actuality of the married state, and where
they are, whatever the outward threats, home is.
Mr. Wilsons feeling that Catherine is not convincing as a human personality, his belief that her love affair with Frederick Henry is an abstraction
of lyric emotion, may be partly explained by the fact that a majority of the
characters in the first two novels are oddly rootless. With a few notable exceptions like Robert Cohn, Brett Ashley, or the priest from Abruzzi, they seem
on the whole to possess no genealogies or previous biographies. We know
nothing about Henrys background, and next to nothing about Catherine
Barkleys. Like Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton, and Dr. Rinaldi, they seem to come
from nowhere, move into the now and here, and depart again for nowhere
after the elapsed time of the novels. They have substance and cast shadows,
but they lack the full perspective and chiaroscuro that one finds among most

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Carlos Baker

of the people in For Whom the Bell Tolls. We are seldom permitted to know
them in depth. The inclination is to accept them for what they do more than
for what they are. They are the men and women of action, the meaning of
whose lives must be sought in the kind of actions in which they are involved,
very much, again, as in Romeo and Juliet.
This feeling about the characters can be accounted for in two different
ways. One has to do with Hemingways esthetic assumptions as of 1928
1929; the other is a natural consequence of the kind of stories he chose to
tell. His working assumption that character is revealed through action will, if
rigorously adhered to, produce the kind of fiction in which characterizationin-depth is in a measure sacrificed to the exigencies of narrative movement.
Even there, however, it is advisable to notice that a close reading of any of
the early books reveals far more in the way of nuances of light and shade,
or in subtle shifts of motivation, than one at first imagined was there. This
half-concealed power is easily explained by what is now acknowledged in all
quarters: Hemingways carefully controlled habit of understatement. As for
the second explanation, it might be pointed out that nearly all of the important characters in the first two novels are displaced personseither men
fighting a war far from their former home-environments, or aliens in foreign
lands whose ties with nearly everything they have known before are now
severedfor better or for worse, but severed.
These two explanations, the esthetic and the geographical, may throw
some further light into the reasons behind Mr. Wilsons strictures. If Hemingway had not yet met head-on the problem of characterization-in-depth, perhaps it was unfair to ask a writer who had done so much so brilliantly that
he should do so much more. He had developed a memorably individualized
style-whittled it, as MacLeish said, from the hard wood of a walnut stick. He
showed an unerring ability to keep his narratives in motion. Finally, he had
achieved mastery of that special combination of naturalistic and symbolic
truthtelling which was the despair of those who could (and so frequently did)
imitate his style and his narrative manner.
In the absence of other evidence, it is probably wisest to assume that
Hemingway knew what he was doing. That he could draw a character fully,
roundedly, and quickly is proved by a dozen minor portraits in the first two
booksCohns acidulous mistress, for example, or Bretts friend Mippipopoulos [sic], or the wonderful old Count Greffi, with whom Henry plays at billiards
and philosophy in the hotel at Stresa, or the Milanese surgeon who does the
operation on Henrys leg after the affair of the trench mortar, a surgeon who
seems, and is, four times as good as the three old-maiden doctors who have
wisely wagged their heads an hour before and advised Henry to wait six months
for the operation. These are only four examples, but they are enough to show
that the ability to draw character was by no means lacking in the Hemingway

The Mountain and the Plain

51

of 1929. If he went no deeper into the backgrounds of his displaced persons,

he went as deeply as he needed to do for the purposes of his narrative. And the
paringout of the superfluous had always been one of his special addictions.
There is, finally, a tendenz in A Farewell to Arms which helps to account
for the opinion that Hemingway has somehow failed in his attempt to present Catherine as a credible characterization. In a large and general way, the
whole movement of the novel is from concretion towards abstraction. This
became apparent in our consideration of the wonderfully complex opening
chapter, and the importance of the observation is enhanced by what happens
in the closing chapters of the book. The fact that the whole story is projected in actualistic terms ought not finally to obscure the symbolic mythos on
which it is built and from which a great part of its emotional power derives.
Catherine may be taken as an English girl who has a Juliet-like liaison with
a young American officer. Similarly, one may read the novel as a naturalistic
narrative of what happened to a small group of people on the Italian front
during the years 19171918.
In the central antithesis between the image of life, love, and home (the
mountain), and the image of war and death (the plain), Catherine however has
a symbolic part to play. It is indeed required of her that she should become, as
the novel moves on towards its denouement, more of an abstraction of love
than a down-to-earth portrait of an actual woman in love and in pain. The truly
sympathetic reader may feel that she is a woman, too. But if she does move in
the direction of abstraction, one might argue that the tendenz of the novel is in
this respect symbolically and emotionally justified. For when Frederick Henry
has closed the door of the hospital room in order to be alone with his dead
wife Catherine, he learns at once, as if by that act, the finality and totality of his
loss. It is the loss of a life, of a love, of a home. Saying good-bye is like saying
good bye to a statue. The loved woman has become in death an abstract unvital
image of her living self, a marble memorial to all that has gone without hope
of recovery. Her death exactly completes the symbolic structure, the edifice of
tragedy so carefully erected. This structure is essentially poetic in conception and
execution. It is achieved without obvious insistence or belaboring of the point,
but it is indubitably achieved for any reader who has found his way into the true
heart of the book. And it is this achievement which enables Hemingways first
study in doom to succeed as something far more than an exercise in romantic
naturalism. Next to For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is his best novel.

No t e s
1. Hemingway, Men at War, introd., p. xx.
2. Details on the composition are drawn from the following letters: EH
to MP, 3/17/28, 3/21/28, 6/7/28, ca. 9/5/28, 9/28/28, 1/8/29, 1/10/29, 1/22/29,
6/7/29, 6/24/29. Also EH to Bridges, 5/18/29; and MP to EH, 5/24/29, and

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Carlos Baker

7/12/29. At the time he began FTA, Hemingway had been for some time at work
on another novela sort of modern Tom Jones, which was up to nearly 60,000
words when he dropped it in favor of the story of Frederick Henry and Catherine
Barkley. On Thanksgiving Day, 1927, he told Perkins that he had completed 17
chapters of the Tom Jones work and was only a third through. He had decided to
change the narrative method to the third person, having got tired of the limitations
imposed by first-person narrative. But FTA, like SAR, used the first-person method.
Hemingway did not begin to employ the third person consistently until the middle
1930s.
3. See Hemingways introduction, dated June 30, 1948, to the illustrated
edition of FTA, New York, Scribners, 1948, pp. viiviii. Hemingway seems to be in
error when he gives the impression that the original publication date was the day
the stock market crashedthat is, October 30, 1929. The book had been published
September 27th. For an excellent review of FTA following publication, see Malcolm
Cowley, New York Herald Tribune Books, October 6, 1929, pp. 1 and 6.
4. The Romeo and Juliet comment is quoted by Edmund Wilson in Ernest
Hemingway: Bourdon Gauge of Morale, which first appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly 164 (July 1939), pp. 3646. The essay was collected in The Wound and the
Bow, New York, 1941, and reprinted by J. K. M. McCaffery, ed., Ernest Hemingway,
The Man and His Work, New York, 1950, pp. 236257. Further page references to
this essay will be to the McCaffery reprint only.
It is of some interest to notice that Bertrand Russell on an American lecture
tour denounced the novel as a piece of Victorianism. See Irene and Allen Cleaton,
Books and Battles, New York, 1937. Compare further the opinion of Oliver Allston
(Van Wyck Brooks) that FTA is another version of the Evangeline story. See The
Opinions of Oliver Allston, New York, 1941, p. 173.
Boston and Italy had other opinions. The serialization of the novel began
in Scribners Magazine in May 1929 (Vol. 85, pp. 493ff.) and ran to October (Vol.
86, pp. 20ff). One startling event of the summer was the banning of the June and
July issues from public sale on the orders of Chief of Police Michael H. Crowley
of Boston. The result, however unhappy for censorship, was increased sales for the
book. A poet in The Daily Oklahoman felt that
Scribners may have larger circulation
Since Boston with its codfish and its beans
Deems Hemingway a menace to the nation.

Both the novel and the film were banned in Italy by Mussolinis government. It
was felt that they showed Italian military valor in an ugly light. The film, which
Hemingway resented as a falsification of his intention, was released in December
1932. Samuel Putnam notes that up to 1947 Hemingway was still popular with
Italian antifascists. (Paris Was Our Mistress, p. 132.)
FTA is the only one of Hemingways works to appear in three media. The
novel was successfully dramatized by Lawrence Stallings, and presented at the
National Theatre, September 22, 1930. See New Republic 64 (October 8, 1930), pp.
208209.
5. On Catherines bad luck, see FTA, pp. 342, 350.
6. FTA, pp. 9, 13.
7. FTA, p. 48.

The Mountain and the Plain

53

8. FTA, p. 78.
9. Expression in America, New York, 1932, p. 519.
10. FTA, pp. 135, 165, 267, 326, and 332 show, in order, the various
premonitions and the obligato use of rain. Malcolm Cowley was one of the first
of Hemingways critics to point to his symbolic use of weather. See The Portable
Hemingway, New York, 1944, introd., p. xvi.
11. On the low morale among the Italian troops, see FTA, pp. 174175. On
Rinaldis affliction, see p. 181. On the priests firmness, see pp. 183184.
12. Coleridge, Table Talk, in Works, ed. Shedd, vol. 6, p. 349.
13. McCaffery, op. cit., p. 254, note.
14. Ibid., p. 242.
15. Malcolm Cowley to CB, 10/20/51.
16. On Catherines connection with the home-feeling, see FTA, p. 163.
Rinaldis remark on her goddess-like qualities is on p. 71.
17. Mr. Theodore Bardacke has an interesting essay on Hemingways
Women in McCaffery, op. cit., pp. 340351. Among its contributions is a discussion
of Hemingways symbolic use of long and short hair as a mark of femininity or the
relative lack of it. The point is of special interest in connection with Maria, who has
been raped and shorn by the fascists. The growing-out of her hair is a reminder of
her gradual return to mental and physical health under the double tutelage of Pilar
and Roberto.

S heridan B aker

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

hen Scribners published The Sun Also Rises on October 22, 1926,
Hemingway had already separated from Hadley Richardson, to whom with
their three-year-old son, John Hadley Nicanor (namesake of bullfighter
Nicanor Villalta), he dedicated the book; and the first phase of Hemingways
career was almost over. The defeated Jake Barnes was to give way to a new
undefeated hero, only to recur again in the half-defeated Frederic Henry.
The Undefeated itself had been written in March, 1925, immediately after
Hemingway returned to Paris from Austria exuberant over the acceptance
of In Our Time, before Pamplona and The Sun Also Rises. But Hemingways
undefeated loser was to continue and eventually triumph in The Old Man
and The Sea, a type of character running somewhat counter to Nick and
Barnes and Henry.
Hemingway had mailed off the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises on April
24, 1926. On Sunday, May 16, alone in Madrid, snowed out of the bullfights,
he had, as he told Plimpton, written three stories in one day:
First wrote The Killers, which Id tried to write before and failed.
Then after lunch I got in bed to keep warm and wrote Today Is
Friday. I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy and
I had about six other stories to write. So I got dressed and walked

Ernest Hemingway: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1967): pp. 5673. Copyright Sheridan Baker.

55

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Sheridan Baker

to Fornos, the old bullfighters caf, and drank coffee and then
came back and wrote Ten Indians. This made me very sad and I
drank some brandy and went to sleep.

Later in the spring he had published Banal Story, probably written

late in 1925, a journalistic, torrents-of-spring report about a writer in a
cold room, an ad for a literary magazine, and the death by pneumonia
of Maera, whose fictive death Hemingway had portrayed from his first
impressions of bullfighting. He had spent the summer in Spain, following the fights and thinking of a book on bullfighting, a project first
mentioned to Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in 1925. In July, To-day Is
Friday had been published as a pamphlet in New Jersey. In December,
1926, two months after The Sun Also Rises, The Undefeatedalready
published in German, English, and Frenchappeared in The Best Short
Stories of 1926.
In 1927, Hemingways stories began to appear in American magazines; and he began a long epic novel. In early spring, a ten-day trip through
Italy by Model T produced a report for the New Republic (May 18) entitled
Italy1927good, oblique journalism to be renamed Che ti Dice La
Patria for the coming volume of fiction, an early symptom of the political
stirrings of Italian memories for A Farewell to Arms. In March The Killers
was published in Scribners Magazine (also selected for Best Short Stories of
1927) and in April, In Another Country; in July, Fifty Grand; in August, Hills Like White Elephants, the last of the stories for Men Without
Women to appear in advance.
The spring of 1927 had seen Hemingway divorced from Hadley Richardson and married to Pauline Pfeiffer, within the Catholic Church. A further
manifestation of Hemingways subterranean Christianity appeared, perhaps a
reaction both from Jake Barness wistful Catholicism and the rough affirmation of To-day Is Friday. Hemingway published in Ezra Pounds Exile magazine (Spring, 1927) a poem that seemed to plead that he had not dropped
out of the advance guard after all. Under the misprinted title of Notheomist
Poem, the text reads:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want him for long.

And a footnote explains: The title Neo-Thomist Poem refers to temporary

embracing of church by literary gentsE. H. Hemingway, with his newly
embraced Catholic bride, now settled in Key West, Floridaa home in
America at last, but at its extreme, fugitive tip.

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

57

***
Men Without Women appeared on October 14, 1927, collected from the
magazines, with four unpublished stories: two competent (A Simple Inquiry, A Pursuit Race), two splendid (Ten Indians, Now I Lay Me). A
month later, on Thanksgiving Day, Hemingway wrote Perkins that he had
seventeen chapters, about one third (60,000 words) of what was intended
to be a sort of modern Tom Jones. His reading of Fielding, swept into The
Torrents of Spring, had turned his thoughts to the big epical novel, which
he was soon to abandon and later to denounce (in Death in the Afternoon):
all bad writers are in love with the epic. He had been trying to write his
epic in the first person (obviously not understanding much about epics), and
had decided to change everything to third person, having got tired of the
limitations that had served in The Sun Also Rises and would serve again in
A Farewell to Arms.
Men Without Women, containing some of Hemingways best stories, nevertheless does not, as a book, equal In Our Time. The title merely catches at
the masculine deprivation or masculine resentment or masculine independence variously to be found in most of the stories. The title, as Carlos Baker
has noted, merely gives an opportune twist to Fords Women and Men, the
second work in The Three Mountains Presss series, of which In Our Time has
seen the sixth and last. The book balances Hemingways two emerging modes,
which might be called the autobiographical and the observational, roughly
the first and the third person between which his epic was equivocating, the
defeated and the undefeated. In Men Without Women, the two modes alternate and engage each other somewhat as two halves of a deck of cards: on
the one hand, In Another Country and Now I Lay Me; on the other, The
Undefeated and Fifty Grand. The book begins with The Undefeated and
ends, like a copy of In Our Time, with Nick and symbolic trout streams, in
Now I Lay Me. The Killers, for all its power, is a hybrid, an observation of
the tough world that shifts to a revelation of Nicks inner agony.
The rest of the stories, good and indifferent, fall between, down to Banal Story, just before the end, which perhaps should have dropped out of
sight completely. (Edmund Wilson and W. M. Frohock, however, consider
it among Hemingways best.) A Simple Enquiry is an efficient study of a
homosexual major, which suffers by comparison with D. H. Lawrences similar The Prussian Officer (published in 1914). Canary for One is autobiographical, another and poorer Out of Season, with a sharp last line. An
Alpine Idyll and A Pursuit Race are unattractive but able stories of isolation and self-destruction.
Hills Like White Elephants is better, a study of the destructiveness
of the selfish, and a study in Hemingways ultimate terseness. A man wants
his consort to have an abortion so that they can be just as we were before.

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Sheridan Baker

The girl knows that the world, with hills like the skin of white elephants,
isnt ours anymore. No matter which way they turn, the mans wish has hurt
them beyond repair. Of the story, Hemingway remarked to Plimpton: I met
a girl in Prunier where Id gone to eat oysters before lunch. I knew shed had
an abortion. I went over and we talked, not about that, but on the way home
I thought of the story, skipped lunch, and spent the afternoon writing it.
Robert McAlmon indicates (in Knolls redaction) that a hint of the story had
been in Hemingways mind since the Rapallo days at Pounds, early in 1923,
for about five years:
One night in Rapallo the lot of us were talking of birth
control, and spoke of the cruelty of the law which did not allow
young unmarried women to avoid having an unwanted child.
Recalling an incident of college days I told a story of a girl who
had managed to have herself taken care of. Her attitude was very
casual. Oh, it was nothing. The doctor just let the air in and few
hours later it was over.

Two years later, continues McAlmon, with his usual inaccuracy, he saw
Hemingways story in some magazine: I didnt see the point of the story
and reread it and encountered the phrase Let the air in. Later Hemingway
informed me that my remark suggested the story. The story is indeed cryptic. The indirection of Hemingways talk with the girl in Prunier is there;
the casual girl of McAlmons anecdote has turned numb, confronting the
casual attitude of her lover; and, of course, there is a great deal more in the
story, from white-skinned, fetal oysters to Hemingway himself.
To-day Is Friday is Hemingways first experiment with the drama.
Three Roman soldiers are talking in the wineshop of a Hebrew (who is
named George, as is the manager of Henrys lunchroom in The Killers,
written an hour or so before). They discuss the routine crucifixion they have
just performed. Hemingway probably intended a shocker, but the plays
positive Christianity is empowered by its rough inarticulation. The second
soldier, at the lowest rung of understanding, wonders why Christ did not
come down off the cross. The first soldier, a good drinker and man of experience, knows Thats not his play. He has illegally slipped the old spear into
him to end His suffering and reward His bravery. He continues to repeat:
He was pretty good in there to-day. The second soldier calls the first a
regular Christer, and when, as they walk away, the first soldier defends the
obsequious George as a nice fella, the second soldier replies: Everybodys
a nice fella to you to-night. Christs suffering has taken effect, even at this
level of understanding. The third soldier can understand no more than that
he has a gut-ache and feels like hell to-night. This is the pagan world,

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

59

the hellish world, suggesting a spiritual dimension it cannot understand but

can partly comprehend. This is Hemingways earthbound Christianity, that
of Nickwho cannot get beyond on earth as he prays, two stories further
alongand that of Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry, whose thoughts fly up
from their earthbound souls. It is also Hemingways first use of Christianity
as a symbology for brave Man crucified by the world, as Young says, and as
Waldmeir has seen it in The Old Man and the Sea.
The Undefeated is a big and fine story, the best of Hemingways bullfighting in fact or fancy, free from the nonsense of Death in the Afternoon,
surpassing in its thoroughness the picture of Romero in The Sun Also Rises.
It is in the new mode, projected out and away from the secret autobiography, fiction solidly created from Hemingways admiration of Manuel Garcia,
known as Maera. Indeed, Romeros exhibit of undefeat in his fight with Cohn
is no accident, for Romero has a great deal of Maera in him, as well as of Nio
de la Palma. Hemingway remembers, in Death in the Afternoon, the last night
of feria when Maera fought Alfredo David in the Caf Kutz. The aging
Manuel Garcia of the story (called kid and Manolo by his friends) is the
first of Hemingways undefeated losers, connecting his first sketch of Maera
with the Old Man of his last novel, whose friend is the boy Manolin.
Hemingway has shifted his attention from the Nicks to the less sensitive
friends of the Nicks, those able to live in the world: Bill of The Three-day
Blow, Tommy of The Light of the World, Bugs of The Battler, George of
The Killers, Bill Gorton, Romero, Count Mippipoplous, Count Greffi. Not
that the essential pattern has changed. The hero is still paired with a friend
more able than he, and more worldly wise. But the pair has moved one whole
step toward the right, from defeat to undefeat. And the hero is now distinctly
a man of lower class and lower intelligence. Garcia is the little one with the
white face; his friend is the huge Zurito, ten years older, now retired, still the
best picador alive. (The real Zurito, in Death in the Afternoon, was the last
and one of the greatest of the old-time picadors.) After moments that equal
those of the great Belmonte, Garcia, booed by the crowd, and gored, finally
kills his bull after five tries. As he goes into oblivion on the operating table,
Zurito lets him keep his pigtail, the sign of the fighter, and assures him he
was going great.
It is a fine and moving story, completely presented. The feel and smell
and excitement of the bullring are all there, created with remarkable reality
from the bullfighters point of view. The grandeur of undefeat shines from the
tawdry surroundingsthe heartless manager whose heart can yet light up for
a second, the pathetic horses, the useless picadors, the hard crowd up there
in the darkness, the jargonal reporterwith the solid Zurito to show that
Garcias dauntless end was unnecessary, and the young Hernandez to show
that his beginning was happy. And because the story is cut down to Garcias

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sizehe cannot read, cannot find words for his thoughtswe have the reality of bullfighting as Hemingway was able to achieve it only occasionally,
when he himself did not try to find words to defend all that lies beyond the
only defensible area: a mans bravery, skill, and dedication.
The story comes from details firmly caught in Hemingways imagination, details recorded and imagined in his first report to the Toronto Star
Weekly and in his first bullfighting sketchesthe dark interior from which
the bull emerges, the bull turning like a cat, the gored matador and the kid
who must try five times, only to sit vomiting before the dead bull as the crowd
throws things, the whacked horses, the little bullfighter pelted and shorn of
his pigtail, the fictional Maera first bumped, then gored and dying on the
operating table. All this comes together with the real Maeras great afternoon
(in Death in the Afternoon) with a dislocated wrist and a bull made out of cement. All has been re-projected from the point of view of a new imaginary
Maera, a man much older, smaller, less skillful, less intelligent than the real
Maera, in a triumphant extension of Hemingways first imaginary projection of him. The young gypsys excellent banderillaring is also an imaginative
transfer of one of Maeras famous skills.
Fifty Grand, which follows the superb defeated interlude of In Another Country, is another story of an undefeated loser, and again, one of
Hemingways greatest stories. The Undefeated is tragic; Fifty Grand is
comic. It is unique among Hemingways stories in that the I is not the hero
but a character ( Jerry Doyle, the prizefighting heros trainer). The narrative
angle is similar to that of My Old Man, except that the I is neither innocent nor instructed. But his limited intelligence turns all the tawdry details
comic and frank, as against the readers broader perceptions. The picture of
the tough world and of Jack Brennan, homebody, worrywart, tightwad, fighter, emerges amusingly and gallantly as Doyles tight lips give us the wisdom of
the ring as if it were the wisdom of the world: Jack got a good hand coming
down through the crowd. Jack is Irish and the Irish always get a pretty good
hand. An Irishman dont draw in New York like a Jew or an Italian but they
always get a good hand.
Doyles observations and omissions constantly give marvelous flashes
of character and detail to solidify the boxing world, in which the champion
moves:
What do you make it? Jack asked the fellows who were
weighing.
One hundred and forty-three pounds, the fat man who was
weighing said.

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

61

Something in the colloquial rhythm, something in the weighty reply, something in the narrators simple assumption that we know all about weighing
and the fat man who does it, makes that solid flesh immortal.
This is the world that Hemingway first attempted in high school in A
Matter of Colour, and in his postgraduate course at the Chicago gym. But
unlike the high-school story, Fifty Grand turns a tricked ending into a supreme test of wits and courage. The brave and amusing Brennan, the classic
boxer who can out-gouge anyone in the clinches, the homebody who fights
for a living, is to be seen again in Harry Morgan of To Have and Have Not,
the buccaneer alone against a buccaneering world. Jack Brennan, as with the
bullfighter before and Morgan after, was modeled on a man Hemingway admired: Jack Britton, who, as Hemingway was to tell Lillian Ross, kept on his
toes and moved around and never let them hit him solid.
***
Underneath the growing manuscript of Hemingways modern Tom Jones, his
third-person observation of the world, the old inner cry persisted. Early in
March, 1928, Hemingway began his final telling of the story of the nurse in
Milan, dropping the epic completely. He began A Farewell to Arms in Paris,
continued during the spring and summer in Key West, wrote a good deal
of the book in Havana, went on in Arkansas and Kansas City, and finished
the first draft in Wyoming in August, six months later. In another five
months, on January 22, 1929, he wrote Perkins that revision was complete.
In May, A Farewell to Arms began to appear monthly in Scribners Magazine,
Hemingway changing galley proof all the way. Book proof arrived in Paris
on June 5. Hemingway mailed it back on June 24, finally achieving a new
and better ending after thirty-nine rewritings. Scribners published it on
September 27, 1929.
A Farewell to Arms is a welling up of the concern with birth and death
with which Hemingway had begun In Our Time, together with his surrogate
hero, Nick, wounded into separate peace, man against a senseless world. The
Caesarian delivery of Hemingways second son, Patrick, at the end of June,
1928when the first draft was nearing completioncolored the Caesarian (and the paternal anxiety) with which Hemingway ends the book, and
with which he had dealt in the first story of In Our Time. His fathers suicide
during the rewriting underlined the tragic, as his Introduction to the 1948
edition was to reveal:
I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived
in and the fine times and the bad times we had that year. But much
more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what
happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and

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the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been. Each
day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where
I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going
good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact that the
book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed
that life was a tragedy and knew it could only have one end. But
finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough
so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you
worked was something that gave a greater pleasure than any I had
ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered.

Hemingways making up what happened is frequently a recapturing

of country traversed before. Nick, wounded and propped against the church,
and his friend Rinaldi became Lieutenant Frederic Henry and his roommate
Rinaldi, now non-combatants, ambulance officer and surgeon. The unnamed
soldier under bombardment at Fossalta who prays Oh Jesus Christ get me
out of here . . . please, please, please . . . Ill do anything you say becomes
young Henry, who, when blown up at night, says Oh God get me out of
here and who prays, later, when his wife is dying: Please, please, please dont
let her die. God please make her not die. Ill do anything you say if you dont
let her die.
Hemingways Italian retreat from Caporetto, which he knew only by report, revives the Greek retreat from Adrianople (as Malcolm Cowley has detected), and revives it in the language both of his Toronto dispatch and of his
revision for In Our Time. The Maritza River that was running yellow almost
up to the bridge becomes the Tagliamento flooded close under the wooden
planking. The Thracian road is now Italian. Here is In Our Time: . . . carts
loaded with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through,
walked along keeping the cattle moving. . . . The women and children were
in the carts, crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles.
Remembering other details reported to Toronto (This main stream is being
swelled from all the back countryChickens dangle by their feet from the
carts), Hemingway now re-creates the Italian retreat:
In the night many peasants had joined the column from the
roads of the country and in the column there were carts loaded
with household goods; there were mirrors projecting up between
mattresses, and chickens and ducks tied to carts. There was a
sewing-machine on the cart ahead of us in the rain. They had
saved the most valuable things. On some carts the women sat
huddled from the rain and others walked beside the carts keeping
as close to them as they could.

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

63

As we have noted, the Thracian retreat taught Hemingway to saturate disaster with rain, as he does throughout the book.
Lieutenant Henry is almost an anthology of Lieutenant Nick (not to
mention Jake Barnes and the joke Italian front). In bed I lay me down
my head, thinks Henry; and he has trouble sleeping without a light, prays
hopelessly, has faith only during the fears of the night. He has a skull fracture, shuts off his thoughts, says of the war: Ill tell you about it if I ever
get it straight in my head. He is wounded in knee and calf; he exercises on
machines in a Milan hospital to which he walks daily, looking in the shops;
he knows his medals are undeserved; and, later, Italians shout at him, as at
Nick, A basso gli ufficiali! The Italian majors advice to Nick sounds like an
unheeded warning against Henrys tragedy: a man must not marry, for, if he
is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that.
As many have noted, Henry repeats Nicks very first words about making a
separate peace.
Of course, the story is significantly different from Nicks, and from the
one first sketched about the nurse in In Our Time. Henry, an architectural
student in Italy, joins the Italian ambulance corps because he can speak Italian. His roommate, Rinaldi, introduces him to Catherine Barkley, a Scotch
nurse of the British Voluntary Aid Detachment. She carries the riding crop of
a childhood fianc recently killed in France. Henry makes advances; she slaps
him, embraces him, says they will lead a strange life. What the hell, thinks
Henry. He is wounded by an explosion of a mortar shell while eating macaroni
and cheese in an ambulance drivers dugout. Catherine transfers to the Milan
hospital, Henry falls in love in earnest, and Catherine becomes pregnant.
Henry returns to the front (October 4, 1917Hemingway has again, as
in The Sun Also Rises, put the story one year ahead of his personal life). He is
just in time for the Italian retreat from Caporetto, from which, his trucks and
men lost one by one, he finally deserts by leaping into the Tagliamento when
battle police try to shoot him as a spy. In civilian clothes, he joins Catherine
in the Italian Alps, from which they escape to Switzerland, rowing all night
across a stormy lake. They wait for the baby, finally delivered, dead, as Catherine dies, and Henry walks back to the hotel, alone, in the rain.
Robert Penn Warren, triangulating from Hemingways other work, has
admirably described what this is supposed to mean. The story does catch, as
Warren says, the long rumble of disintegrating Christian and social faith that
reached a crescendo in World War I. Henry wants some kind of faith like that
of the priest in the officers mess, who comes from mountains where a man
may love God, and religion is not a dirty joke. Henry will find his faith in
the religion of love, and will learn, as the priest says, to sacrifice and to serve.
Henry learns, says Warren, that personal love is doomed by all the accidents
of a blackguard universe, that the whole is just a dirty trick after allBut

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Sheridan Baker

this is not to deny the value of the effort, or to deny the value of the discipline,
the code, the stoic endurance, the things that make it trueor half truethat
nothing ever happens to the brave.
Unfortunately, this does not fit Henry, as it does fit Manuel and Hemingways other undefeated losers. Henry is not wholly one of the disciplined:
he finds that his officering is first unnecessary, then ineffective, then meaningless. Even the disciplined Rinaldi goes glum, his surgical skill no longer
adequate protection from the diseased world. Henry is not one of the brave:
he knows his batting is only average. Henry may have learned the value of
effort, though Hemingway is far from intent on the demonstration. Henry
does say, It has only happened to me like that once, as he looks back on the
story he is telling, exactly as Nick looks back in Now I Lay Me, when all
was long ago and he has never married. In this single remark, Henry indicates
that he has learned the full value of what he has lost. But Warrens effort can
mean only the effort to make love last, which is something different from the
discipline, the code, the stoic endurance. James Light and others who laud
Henrys stoicism merely extend Warrens misreading.
Henry is not one of the undefeated, nor is he one of the defeated so
sweetly drawn in the alienated Nick and the sleepless Nick, so commendably drawn in Barnes. Henry is still capable of action, and his own action
defeats him, contrary, I think, to what Hemingway intends and Warren reads.
Jake Barnes is a rugged name and man, whom war has prepared for Bretts
slaughter. Nick Adams has the very name of Man, but war has nicked him
and knocked him out. And in his defeat he eventually invites, I believe, a faint
sneer from his creator, who calls him a condescending Nicholas. Frederic
Henry has the same faint scorn in it, the faintly effeminate ring already heard
in the Henry on the lips of the Doctors wife, in Henry Braddocks and
in the chauffeur Henry of The Sun Also Rises, and in other recurrent Henrys. As Young suggests, Hemingway may have adapted the name from Stephen Crane, whose own frequent and slightly patronized Henrys culminate
in Henry Fleming (a name virtually the reverse of Frederic Henry) of The
Red Badge of Courage. Hemingway may have seen the name as a kind of personal anagram, half-conscious and self-accusatory: Henry compressed from
Hemingway, with Frederic another first name calling for defense. We will
see the same thing in the naming of Francis Macomberin a story that
may, as Young suggests, derive its plot from Cranes Red Badge. Even a k
on Frederic would have toughened it slightly. Is Henrys name Frederico
Enrico or Enrico Federico?an Italian messmate asks (Rinaldi calls him
Federico, without the r). To be sure, Hemingway may have been thinking of
Frederic Manning, soldier and avant-garde writer in Paris, whose The Middle
Parts of Fortune (published in 1929, contemporaneously with A Farewell to
Arms) Hemingway was to read each year on the anniversary of Hemingways

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

65

(and Henrys) wounding. Again, we may think of Henry IV, whence big-game
hunter Wilsons brave motto, and even of Frederick the Great. But Hemingway and the modern world have undermined the glory in those names. Frederic Henry is a strange name for a modern hero, alongside the Nicks and
Jakes and Jacks.
Hemingways uncertainty, uncontrolled because not thoroughly understood, follows Henry to the end. In spite of feminine shadows, Henry is an
astounding lover, a mans man, well-liked by barkeep and count, able at doing
those things that gave you a false sense of soldiering; slightly contemptuous
of the real soldier, slightly contemptuous of his own job, too, yet disappointed
to see how well it runs without him. He is an officeran officer in an army
not an army, somewhat behind the lines of a secondary front: in the war but
not of it. There is with Henry, from the beginning, a sense of uneasiness, of
disillusion, about ones role.
There is, indeed, a strange confusion of male and female which, though
poetic and almost choreographic, probably goes deeper than Hemingway
knew. In the beginning, cartridge boxes on the belts of muddy troops bulged
forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as
though they were six months gone with child; and at the end, Catherine out
walking on the road did not look big with the cape . . . . In the beginning, we
have Henry and Rinaldi, his roommate who kisses him and calls him baby
in the Italian manner; in the end, Catherine and Henry. The book begins, on
the masculine side of the dance, as if a married couple and not a group of
menindeed as if a wifewere looking out at the war: In the late summer
of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the
plain to the mountains. . . . Troops went by the house and down the road. . . .
The second chapter begins with identical domesticity, even more cloistered:
we are now living in a house in Gorizia that had a fountain and many
thick shady trees in a walled garden and a wistaria vine purple on the side of
the house. This is indistinguishable from the domesticity of Catherine and
Henry at the end: That fall the snow came very late. We lived in a brown
wooden house in the pine trees on the side of the mountain. . . . At the end,
the magic of the mountains, as Carlos Baker says, is at work. But at the beginning, the untutored reader may be surprised when he finally comes upon the
soft-voiced narrator looking at the snow out of the window of a bawdy house,
an officer drinking with another officer. At the beginning, whether we like it
or not, the anonymous Frederic Henry sounds very much like a woman.
At the end, when Henry is supposed to be disciplined and stoic and filled
with valuable effort, we find that he is in fact unmanned by Catherine, defeated by Catherine, as Theodore Bardacke has pointed out, in his Hemingways
Women, just as surely as Barnes is unmanned vis--vis Brett. Hemingways
basic distrust of women has unstrung his lyre. The nurse who threw him over

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Sheridan Baker

will not wholly convert into the lady true unto death. Catherine of the long
blond hair, which first catches Henrys eye, which tents their kisses in bed, is
not so womanly as Hemingway seems to suppose. She is uncomfortably similar to the sleek British Brett of Jakes hospital tour. Young has already noted
their similar backgrounds as nurses with lovers killed in the war. Catherine is
also narrow of hip; she wants to bob her hair, to forget maternity. She makes
Henry her plaything, having him grow a beard (on which he asks instructions),
wanting him to grow his hair a little longer: . . . and I could cut mine and wed
be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark. Make me a boy again
just for tonight! She wants to be you too; she wants us to be all mixed up.
She does not really want him to go skiing with the men; and Henry replies, I
wont ever go away. . . . Im no good when youre not there. I havent any life at
all any more. When Catherine says that she will cut her hair when she is thin
again, and become a fine new and different girl for him to fall in love with:
Hell, I said. I love you enough now. What do you want to
do? Ruin me?
Yes. I want to ruin you.
Good, I said, Thats what I want too.

What Henry thinks in his last phase, he does not record. He tries not to
think. We do learn that the beard makes him self-conscious in the shadowboxing mirror at the gym, and that it makes him seem in the hospital mirror
a fake doctor with a beard. But he likes it; it gives him something to do.
Catherine likes it: It looks so stiff and fierce and its very soft and a great
pleasure. It is a perfect symbol for Henrys disguised effeminacy, fierce yet
false, really soft to please a woman. Henry is much the war-numbed Nick,
also much the man forbearing with a woman with child, giving and serving
at last as the priest said he would. But he is unmanned nevertheless; and the
beard (as with Hemingways own) makes a compensation too obvious. Awake
one night, he hears Catherine, also lying awake, mention her first craziness.
He lies awake for quite a long time thinking about things and watching
Catherine sleeping, the moonlight on her face.
Life with the beautiful Catherine does arouse uneasy thought. She remains something of a puzzle to the reader. Edmund Wilson and Malcolm
Cowley and others have found her unsatisfactory, a masculine daydream on
paper; and Carlos Baker has only called up other unsatisfactory heroines in
her defense. Cowley, indeed, has hit the startling truth when he says that she
is credible only at the beginningin her near madness. Actually, Catherine, who continues to say that she is all right now and no longer crazy,
retains uncomfortable touches of madnessamong which, her very protestationsuntil pregnancy takes its benign effect. Hemingway records a clinical

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

67

history he seems not to understand, just as he fails to see through the twilight
of his hero.
Catherine is afraid of the rain, because she sees herself dead in it. On the
other hand, she is strangely blithe, living in the moment, careless of contraception, of marriage, of pregnancy, of going A.W.O.L., of Henrys deserting,
of danger, of crossing a stormy lake with little concern. She has no religion,
none of Henrys feeling that perhaps one should. She goes into sudden reverie, thinking her first sexual experience the same as her madness:
She came back from wherever she had been.
I had a very fine little show and Im all right now. You see Im not
mad and Im not gone off. Its only a little sometimes.

When she tells Henry she is pregnant, she suddenly goes away a long way
and comes back from wherever she had beena phrase to knell ominously
at the end when, after temporary anesthetic, she came back from a long
way away.
And with all the cheeriness, she is paranoid: We work very hard but
no one trusts ustheres only us two and in the world theres all the rest of
them. If anything comes between us were gone and then they have us. This,
the two alone against the others, Henry eventually takes for his own, now
needing Catherine to keep him from fears of the night. Henry and Hemingway take this strange insulation of Catherines as so much courage that the
world must finally break her. To be sure, Catherine is attractive scene by scene,
and perfectly credible, with her ability to make a cot a home, her daintiness
of nightgown, her pleasant spirits; but she remains ephemeral because neither Henry nor Hemingway can add her scenes accurately. Hemingway has
unwittingly, I think, written the story that also defeated F. Scott Fitzgerald in
Tender is the Night, though Fitzgerald at least knew what he was attempting:
the story of a man unmanned in trying to serve the charming fey.
Perhaps the real source of our uneasiness (and of Hemingways) is Henry
himself. Hemingway writes a story about manhood and self-respect lost for
a love that ends in death, and he thinks he has written of a transcendent love
crushed by a meaningless world, and of a man learning to take the ultimate
loss. Henry is ruined by woman, not by the world; and he is enough of the
man of action to be vaguely haunted by a mistake neither he nor Hemingway
can admit, though they suggest its pressure.
For Henrys separate peace, contrary to several distinguished opinions,
is not that announced by young Nick to his Rinaldi. Nick had been joking, as
he notes with satisfaction that the battle is succeeding on up the street and
that the stretchers soon will come. He and Rinaldi are no longer patriots

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Sheridan Baker

apparently the term, in the slightly anarchistic Italian army, for the eager
soldier, the military apple-polisher of any army. Like swallow-tailed ambassadors, Nick and Rinaldi have made a separate peace, in a phrase then current
among the uneasy allies. Nick is joking because they have been knocked out
of the war and out of patriotism by enemy gunfire. Their peace has been not
at all of their own making. Lieutenant Henrys peace, however, is of his own
making. He is hale and on his feet. He deserts a disintegrating army, angry,
to be sure, and with considerable provocation. But he has taken the action.
Now, in civilian clothes, he is in a train with some scornful aviators (shades of
Jake Barnes!). They leave. He does not want to read the paper: I was going to
forget the war. I had made a separate peace. I felt damned lonely. . . .
Henry has deserted, saving himself through anger and for love. He
knows that the unpatriotic Piani will return to the unit, more constant though
with much less danger. Henrys conscience bothers him, but soon Catherine
absorbs even this:
It was clouding over outside and the lake was darkening.
I wish we did not always have to live like criminals. I said.
Darling, dont be that way. You havent lived like a criminal
very long. And we never live like criminals. Were going to have a
fine time.
I feel like a criminal. Ive deserted from the army.
Darling, please be sensible. Its not deserting from the army.
Its only the Italian army.
I laughed. Youre a fine girl. Lets get back into bed. I feel fine
in bed.

Henrys symbolic resignation from society, which we accept with lessened

qualms, Warren points out, because it is only the Italian army, leaves Henry
the misgivings he can forget only in Catherines arms. Like the war-numbed
Nick, he stops his mind from thinking; but with Nick it was horror, and with
Henry it is guilt. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were
obscene beside the concrete names of villages, . . . the numbers of regiments
and the dates. True. But as Henry attempts to reject the society that has
mouthed the words (and has kept paying his sight-drafts without question), he
cannot forget, as Hemingway himself could not, that he bore no honored nor
courageous number, that he was only a pseudo-officer, that his medals were
slightly spurious. Henry is enough of an undefeated man of action to leave
him, and us, uneasy about his defeated inaction at the end. Catherines death,
which leaves him utterly alone in the rain, cannot quite weigh as an indictment of the world and its wars, nor as a lesson for Henry, nor as a splendor of
irrational ironies, hardly even as a tragedy of young life wasted in the worlds

Frederic Henry and the Undefeated

69

tanglethe Romeo and Juliet that Hemingway and Carlos Baker have hoped
it to be. The meaning simply drifts away, uncertainly, in the rain.
But the book has a poetry that almost holds it together: A Farewell to
Armsthe lonely, lyric A, the heraldic diction. The title is poetic, indeed, being also the title of a poem by the Elizabethan, George Peele, who regretfully
bids both the arms of glory and the arms of love farewell, as Philip Young
and Jerome L. Mazzaro have pointed out. Professor Harry Levin has thought
that the title came from Richard Lovelace. And though Lovelace can show
no phrase even close, no such pun on the arms of love and war, Hemingways
sweet goodbye would certainly have been stronger and truer if, indeed, his
Henry had flown to Warre and Armes, and not from them, if he had tried
to rejoin his scattered unit though a Hell of carabinieri should bar the way,
though he should have been disgracefully shot, knowing that he could not
love his Dear so much loved he not Honour more.
But the song goes flat only after the flight to Switzerland, and we realize that a peg must have slipped unnoticed. Minute by minute, the song is, in
Warrens word, hypnotic, as it sings of what it is like to be in a war in a world
adrift, and to know the excitements of love made reckless in consequence. The
march of the seasons, chapter by chapter, the ominous march of the rain, the
two alone in the night against the flashes of war, yes, it is good:
That night a bat flew into the room through the open door that
led onto the balcony and through which we watched the night over
the roofs of the town. It was dark in our room except for the small
light of the night over the town and the bat was not frightened but
hunted in the room as though he had been outside. We lay and
watched him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still.
After he went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the
beam move across the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A
breeze came in the night and we heard the men of the anti-aircraft
gun on the next roof talking.

Hemingway has in fact used poetry itself for his poetic effects: Henry
quotes Marvells famous couplet (learned from the man who made it famous,
T. S. Eliot, as Donna Gerstenberger has shown and Hemingway himself has
indicated in Death in the Afternoon):
But at my back I always hear
Times wingd chariot hurrying near.

And toward the end, the lovers feel as though something were hurrying
us and we could not lose any time together. The little pre-Elizabethan

Sheridan Baker

70

lyric about the western wind and the small rain and loves arms is even
more intricately suffused through Henrys thoughts of Catherine during
the retreat, as Charles R. Anderson has shown in his Hemingways Other
Style. Hemingways characteristic reiteration of word, phrase, and picture
are beautifully and darkly expanded so that the essential lyric cry of self is
braided with harmonics from beginning to end. And the construction is
nicely balanced: pregnant troops at the beginning, pregnant Catherine at
the end; statues in the hospital as Henry meets Catherine, Catherine dead
in the hospital like a statue, as he leaves her.
As with the exposition, so with the scenesCatherine in the red plush
room, Henry and the pompous doctors:

Do you want to keep your knee, young man?

No, I said.
What?
I want it cut off. I said, so I can wear a hook on it.

The secondary characterizations are perfect: Rinaldi, and Valentini the other
surgeon, and Ferguson, and Count Greffi (one of Ezra Pounds old men with
beautiful manners), and the wonderful Italian ambulance driversthe
kind of idiomatic portraiture Hemingway first struck in Out of Season,
and continued in Now I Lay Me. The whole retreat from Caporetto is as
vivid as anything Hemingway ever wrote, subtly touched with reminders
of love sacred and profane, the soldiers only solace (as Anderson says): the
harlot of the fluttering tongue, the frightened virgins, the inexplicit dream
of Catherine. The book is full of the kind of writing and seeing that would
make its author happy every day: the sudden interiors of houses that had
lost a wall through shelling; troops that moved smoothly, almost supernaturally over a bridge, before Henry sees that they are on bicycles; or this:
I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the
weights on a dolls eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs.
Yet, as Edmund Wilson said some time ago and I am surprised to discover, A Farewell to Arms is a lesser book than The Sun Also Rises, even a lesser
love story. The romantic cry is not so true, nor even so sad, since Henry leaves
us trying to blame the world for private deficiencies as well as for Catherines
death, and a still, small Tiresian voice warns us against trying to smoke the
bounder out. The little major of In Another Country was completely convincing, as was the unwarranted death of his young wife. His is a world of
some cruel whim, and his cry that one should not marry and expose oneself
is right from the heart. But Henry is so unmanned by his wife, as the major
is not, that toward the end we can almost read a resentful cryptogram, to the
effect that men can remain undefeated only without women.

M ichael S . R eynolds

Going Back

So we walked along through the street where I saw my very good friend
killed, . . . and it all seemed a very sad business. I had tried to recreate
something for my wife and had failed utterly. The past was as dead as
a busted victrola record. Chasing yesterdays is a bum showand if you
have to prove it go back to your old front.
Ernest Hemingway A Veteran Visits Old Front
(TDS, July 22, 1922)

hen Frederic Henry, hero of Hemingways A Farewell to Arms, lived

in the house that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains,
it was the late summer of 1915. Italy had just entered the European War,
and Ernest Hemingway had just turned sixteen in upper Michigan. In the
spring of 1918, Catherine Barkley died in childbirth in Lausanne, Switzerland; in April, 1918, Ernest Hemingway drew his last pay check from the
Kansas City Star and left for his own war experience in northern Italy.1
When he reached Italy in 1918 for his shortlived tour as a Red Cross
ambulance driver, the Italian front bore no resemblance to the front at
which Frederic had served for two years as an ambulance driver in the Italian army. In June, 1918, American Red Cross Ambulance Section Four, to
which Hemingway was assigned, was stationed at Schio in the Dolomite
In Hemingways First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1976): pp. 319. Copyright 1976 Princeton University Press.

71

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Michael S. Reynolds

foothills. Although there was a major Austrian offensive in June, there

was little action at Schio. Hemingway drove Section Four ambulances for
only three weeks. In July he asked to be transferred to the canteen operation along the more active Piave river front. At Fossalta di Piave, on July
8, 1918, he was blown up by an Austrian trench mortar. He had been in
the war zone for about one month, and he was not to return to it actively
in that war.2
Carlos Baker has remarked that Hemingway was acutely conscious of
place, and that he was painfully accurate in his geographic descriptions.3 Mary
Hemingway has described the careful checking of street names and distances
that Hemingway put into A Moveable Feast.4 Hemingway himself said that
his concern was for the way it was, which he loosely defined as the people,
the places, and how the weather was. Against this concern it is difficult to
balance his lack of firsthand knowledge of the Italian front of 19151917.
He had not seen the Tagliamento river when he wrote A Farewell to Arms;
he had not walked the Venetian plain between Codroipo and Latisana. It
was not until 1948 that he saw Udine.5 He may never have seen Gorizia, the
Isonzo river, Plava, or the Bainsizza plateau; he certainly had not seen them
when he wrote the novel. His return trip to Fossalta di Piave in 1922 and his
skiing trip at Cortina dAmpezzo in 1923 did not take him to the terrain of
the novel. His 1927 trip to Italy with Guy Hickock did not cover the war
zone of 19151917.6 Not only had Hemingway not experienced the military
engagements in which Frederic Henry takes part, but he had not seen the
terrain of Books One and Three of A Farewell to Arms. Yet the geography is
perfectly accurate and done with the clarity that made its author famous for
his descriptions of place.
Because the Caporetto section (Book Three) is so powerfully written,
most critics have confined their remarks about military descriptions to this
portion of the book, being content to make generalizations about the remainder of the military activity in the novel. Book Three has been widely recognized for its narrative excellence, and early reviewers like Malcolm Cowley,
Percy Hutchinson, and H. S. Canby responded to Hemingways power in this
section.7 Canby called the description of the retreat a masterly piece of reporting (my emphasis).8 Yet none of these men had served on the Italian front
and should not be expected to notice minor inaccuracies if they existed.
Later critics, more knowledgeable about Hemingways biography, knew
that he had not participated in the retreat; but they also knew that he had
covered the Greek retreat in the GrecoTurkish War (1922) as a journalist. It
was an easy assumption that Hemingway had transposed his Greek experience
to the Friulian plain of northern Italy: steady rain, muddy roads, stumbling
refugees. What this assumption fails to account for is the considerable amount

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73

of specific detail in Book Three of A Farewell to Arms that has nothing to do

with muddy roads or refugees.
One would expect European readers to be more critical. Yet one French
reviewer wrote: The one aspect of the last war which has least interested writers is the defeat. . . . There has been need for an American witness on the Alpine
front who could reveal to us, in its abject horror, the Italian rout near Caporetto:
. . . If Hemingway has not dedicated all his book to this debacle, . . . one can
believe that he had to obey autobiographical motives.9
Italian critics, some of whom took part in the Caporetto retreat, were
unable to find any fault with Hemingways history or geography. The Italian
fascist government under Mussolini found the account of Caporetto so painful,
and presumably so accurate, that A Farewell to Arms was banned in Italy until
after World War Two. In 1930 one Italian reviewer saw the novel as unvarnished autobiography: [The novel] narrates autobiographically his experience
as an officer on the Italian front after he, although a foreigner, enlisted in our
army as a volunteer, more through the desire to do like everyone else (he was
already in Italy as an architecture student) than through ideological dedication;
and then of his flight as a deserter after Caporetto . . . every page of the books
resembles a sheet torn from a notebook. . . . One hears the eulogy of the Duke
of Aosta pronounced in words so banal and nasty as to move anyone who
remembers the Duke and those years at all well to protest. . . . the time is objectively precise, with references to dates and historical episodes, but it has no color,
no duration . . . diary composition comes to mind . . . rather too scrupulous and
unified. (My emphasis)10
Twentyfive years later another Italian critic, reading the book more
sympathetically and more nostalgically, was no less convinced of the historic
and geographic accuracy: Fourfifths of the work unfolds in Northern Italy,
in Milan and above all among the hills, mountains and plains of the Veneto
which are particularly dear to my heart. Every landscape evoked in the now famous novel, every place cited, is familiar to me. . . . The novel . . . evokes the climate
of the first two years of the war until the disaster of Caporetto with extraordinary
vivacity. . . . All that his protagonist narrates has an undeniable sound of authenticity. . . . After the intoxication of the days in May (which he does not mention
but in which he [Hemingway] certainly must have taken part to be led to enlist
and leave for the front during his stay in Italy) he found himself in a country in
which the war was not felt but only submitted to as a calamitous circumstance
. . . this actually was . . . the climate of Italy between the summer of 1915 and the
autumn of 1917. The picture painted by Hemingway is exact. . . . one who wishes
to know what the defeat was like in the minds of officers and soldiers of the Second
Army after Caporetto can read A Farewell to Arms. Perhaps in no other book
are the tragic days relived with such intensity. . . . Only one who truly loves
the country, who has suffered there and lived there intensely can describe

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Michael S. Reynolds

the Venetian countryside, or speak of the disaster of Caporetto as Ernest

Hemingway has done. (My emphasis)11
In 1954 Alberto Rossi, who had collaborated on several translations of
Hemingway novels into Italian, reviewed Charles Fentons The Apprenticeship
of Ernest Hemingway. Rossi reminded his Italian readers that Hemingways
considerable talents are above all his ability to present a situation as actually lived with a few wellchosen touches; one tends instinctively to identify
the character who narrates with the author himself, and thus to attribute to
the author the intention of affirming, as authentic and experienced by him,
all the details of his own story. But Rossi had great difficulty in believing
that Hemingway had not taken part in the retreat from Caporetto: That the
work was in effect one of imagination and not of history, however evident
this seems, was not an affirmation which could satisfy everyones curiosity.
He was perplexed by the accuracy he could not account for biographically:
It is no less evident that for certain parts of that novel his imagination was
not working on data of direct experience; and among these is the impressive
evocation of the retreat.12
Even after Malcolm Cowley, in the introduction to the Portable Hemingway, pointed out that the author had not taken part in the Caporetto retreat,
American critics failed to question Hemingways accuracy. The main stream
of Hemingway criticism has followed either Carlos Baker into romantic and
biographic criticism or Philip Young into psychological analyses, all of which
were encouraged by the virile public image Hemingway cultivated. One need
only to read through the massive bibliography of Hemingway criticism to see
how limited most second and thirdgeneration criticism has become and
how debilitating it has been for the novels.13
As early as 1922, Hemingway had begun to formulate a method of
dealing with reality. In a feature story for the Toronto Daily Star, A Veteran Visits Old Front, he told how depressing it was to return to the
scene of battles he had taken part in, for the country was so changed that
it ruined the memory. It would have been better to have visited a battle site
he had not known: Go to someone elses front if you want to. There your
imagination will help you out and you may be able to picture the things that
happened [my emphasis].14 This same idea appears in the deleted coda to
Big TwoHearted River (c. 1924):
The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what
you imagined. . . . You had to digest life and then create your own
people. . . . Nick in the stories was never himself. He had made
him up. Of course hed never seen an Indian woman having a
baby. That was what made it good. [My emphasis]15

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75

In a 1935 Esquire article Hemingway gave a somewhat fuller statement on

the point:
Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it
will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life he
has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something
up it is as it truly would be. . . . Imagination is the one thing
beside honesty that a good writer must have, the more he learns
from experience the more truly he can imagine. If he gets so he can
imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all
really happened and that he is just reporting. [My emphasis]16

In 1948, when he wrote his own introduction for an illustrated edition

of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway made no pretense of having experienced
the historical events of the novel firsthand:
I remember living in the book and making up what happened in
it every day. Making the country and the people and the things
that happened I was happier than I had ever been. . . . Finding you
were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it
made you happy to read it.17

And in 1958, when he was interviewed by the Paris Review, Hemingway

restated his position with the same simplicity he had used in 1922:
Q: Have you ever described any type of situation of which you had
no personal knowledge?
A: That is a strange question. . . . A writer, if he is any good does
not describe. He invents or makes out of his knowledge personal and
impersonal. [My emphasis]18

Over a thirtysixyear span, Hemingways attitude toward his profession remained constant on the point of making it up. Yet no one ever took
him very seriously, for he had been typed as an autobiographic writer when
he published The Sun Also Rises. His statements about invented action on the
basis of knowledge personal and impersonal appeared either simpleminded
or some sort of ruse. They were neither.
In his terse disciplinary sketches written in 19221923, Hemingway
had already developed an objective style that treated the experience of others
as his own. Of the eighteen sketches, called chapters, collected in the 1924
edition of in our time, eight were based on secondhand information. Two of
the sketches were based on the war experiences of his British friend, Captain

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Michael S. Reynolds

E. E. DormanSmith, at the fighting around Mons. Another (Chapter 16)

described the goring and death of the matador Maera. At the time Hemingway had never seen a bullfight, and Maera was very much alive. Hemingway
based his description on conversations with Mike Strater and Gertrude Stein.
Chapter 6, which describes the inglorious execution of the deposed Greek
cabinet ministers, was based on a newspaper clipping. The ninth chapter,
which describes the shooting of the cigarstore bandits, was based on a story
in the Kansas City Star from Nov. 19, 1917. The hanging of Sam Cardinella
(Chapter 17) probably came from either policestation or cityroom gossip from the Kansas City days. The description of the King of Greece in his
garden (Chapter 18) was based on information related to Hemingway by an
acquaintance who had an informal interview with the king.19 From the beginning Hemingway felt free to use second-hand sources.
After Hemingway showered Stephen Crane with praise in his introduction to Men at War, critics began to note thematic and structural similarities
between The Red Badge of Courage and A Farewell to Arms. What was carefully ignored by the critics was the reason why Hemingway said he admired
Cranes novel:
Crane wrote [The Red Badge of Courage] before he had ever seen
any war. But he had read contemporary accounts, had heard the
old soldiers, they were not so old then, talk, and above all he had
seen Matthew Bradys wonderful photographs. Creating his story
out of this material he wrote that great boys dream of war that
was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it
would ever live to see. It is one of the finest books in our literature
and I include it entire because it is all as much of one piece as a
great poem is. 20

Hemingways praise is neither for Cranes structure nor for his theme;
the praise is for the technique and the verity. In 1928, when he was writing
his first war novel, Hemingway already knew about Cranes research method
in The Red Badge of Courage. While working on the Transatlantic Review in
1924, Hemingway served as a subeditor under Ford Madox Ford. Ford had
known Crane during the Brede Manor days in England, and later Ford both
wrote and lectured on the young American writer. One of the things that
Ford knew about Crane, and that was not public knowledge, was the way in
which Crane had researched his war novel. During Hemingways association
with Ford in 1924, he must have heard the anecdote, probably more than
once. Cranes research methods that Hemingway chose to praisereading
histories, talking to veterans, and looking at pictureswere the same methods that Hemingway used on A Farewell to Arms.

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As early as 1922, Hemingway had already done sufficient historical

reading to pose as an expert on a war in which he had served only briefly and
that he later admitted he did not understand. When he wrote his Toronto
Daily Star feature, A Veteran Visits Old Front ( July 1922), he created the
flat tone of the seasoned campaigner, alluding to many more events than he
had experienced:
I remember . . . looking out the window down at the road where
the arc light was making a dim light through the rain. It was the
same road that the battalions marched along through the white
dust in 1916. They were the Brigata Ancona, the Brigata Como,
the Brigata Tuscana and ten others brought down from the Carso,
to check the Austrian offensive that was breaking through the
mountain wall of the Trentino and beginning to spill down the
valleys that led to the Venetian and Lombardy plains. They were
good troops in those days and they marched through the dust of
early summer, broke the offensive along the GalloAsiagoCanove
line, and died in the mountain gullies, in the pine woods on the
Trentino slopes, hunting cover on the desolate rocks and pitched
out in the softmelting early summer snow of the Pasubio.
It was the same old road that some of the same brigades marched
along through the dust in June 1918, being rushed to the Piave
to stop another offensive. Their best men were dead on the rocky
Carso in the fighting around Goritzia, 21 on Mount San Gabrielle,
on Grappa, and in all the places where men died that nobody ever
heard about.

When he wrote those words Hemingway had never seen the Carso,
Gorizia, or Mount San Gabrielle. When the road turned dust at Schio in
1916, he was preparing for his senior year in high school. The journalist must
always be the expert, and he had already developed a keen sense of the insiders information. He had learned that hard facts create an immediate sense
of authenticity. Those were not just soldiers on any roadthey were specific
brigades who died at specific places. In order to write this article, Hemingway
had done extensive reading on the art of war, which he continued throughout
his life. He may not have known in 1922 how much he would need that reading in 1928 when he came to write A Farewell to Arms, but in the manuscript
of the novel, historical facts, dates, places, and events roll from the writers
pencil with facility and accuracy.

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Michael S. Reynolds

In that 1922 visit to Schio, Hemingway realized a truth that he passed

on to his readers and that he remembered when he tried to make fictional
sense of his own war experience:
Dont go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your
head of something that happened in the night in the mud at
Paschendaele, or of the first wave working up the slope of Vimy,
do not try and go back and verify them. It is no good. The front is
different from the way it used to be. . . . Go to someone elses front
if you want to. There your imagination will help you out and you
may be able to picture the things that happened. . . . The past was
as dead as a busted victrola record. Chasing yesterdays is a bum
showand if you have to prove it go back to your old front. 22

If he functions in the realist/naturalist tradition, a writer is always chasing yesterdays. In writing A Farewell to Arms, however, Hemingway went back
to someone elses front and recreated the experience from books, maps, and
firsthand sources. It is his only novel set on terrain with which he did not
have personal experience; in it, his imagination, aided by military histories,
has recreated the AustroItalian front of 19151917 more vividly than any
other writer.
Hemingway, the public man, may have been just as much of a romantic
as some readers would see him, and many of his plots may have smelled of the
museums, as Gertrude Stein thought. But as an artist, Hemingway was able
to approach his material in those early years with an objectivity that never
allowed personal experience or friendships to interfere with his fiction. Like
most twentiethcentury innovators, he found himself his own best subject,
but to mistake his art for his biography is to mistake illusion for reality. In
Green Hills of Africa no reader can believe that the dialogue is a reportorial
account of what was actually said, or that there is no artistry in Hemingways
arrangement of the action. Even in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway warns the
reader: If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there
is always some chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on
what has been written as fact.23
To read any of Hemingways fiction as biography is always dangerous, but to read A Farewell to Arms in this manner is to misread the book.
Hemingway himself was particularly anxious, during those early years, for
Scribners to keep biographical statements about him out of print. In letters
to his editor, Max Perkins, he urged that the critics and readers be allowed to
make up their own lies (Feb. 14, 1927). He belittled his own war experiences,
telling Perkins that the medals had been given to him simply because he
was an American attached to the Italian army. One medal, he insisted, was

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awarded for action on Monte Maggiore when he was three hundred kilometers away in a hospital at the time. He did not want anyone to think him a
faker, a liar, or a fool (Feb. 19, 1929). Perkins agreed to correct misinformation that Scribners had unknowingly given out to the media and to restrain
the publicity department in the future, remarking that usually authors were
so intent on such publicity that it had not occurred to him that Hemingway
might be sensitive on the point.
Like most of his central characters, Hemingway in 19281929 preferred
to exist in the present tense, with as little reference to the past as possible,
particularly his private past. Later, when biographical critics like Fenton and
Young began to probe into his private life, Hemingway resented it bitterly.
In a letter to Carlos Baker, he said that biographies of living writers were
destructive in several ways. Because all writers wrote out of their own experience, the premature biographer was nothing more than a spoiler, ruining
experiences that the writer might have turned into fiction. All writers, he
insisted, write about living people; that is, they use them for the base upon
which they build their fictional characters. Biographical critics were forcing
him to create characters no longer credible because he had become so conscious of covering up the original.24
Readers have always wanted to see the heroes as projections of their author, and critics have generally promoted the parallel. Hemingway, however,
in the Twenties never encouraged the parallelism. He admitted to using real
prototypes for characters, like Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, but he felt that
most of the characters he used did not read books.25 Unfortunately, The Sun
Also Rises was read as a thinly veiled whos who of Paris and Pamplona, and
Hemingway was never able to convince his critics afterwards that he did not
do this all the time or that his central character was not himself. In 1926, he
told Scott Fitzgerald that in spite of what he and Zelda always thought, Cat
in the Rain was not a story about Hemingway and Hadley. He explained that
the two characters were a Harvard graduate and his wife whom he had met
in Genoa.26
To read A Farewell to Arms as biography is to believe that Hemingway
learned nothing from The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, where
the use of real people had caused him considerable difficulty. In the correspondence with Maxwell Perkins during the galleyproof stage of The Sun
Also Rises, Perkins asked him to make numerous small changes to avoid libel
suits. After much bargaining, Hemingway obscured references to Glenway
Wescott, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Henry James. In The Sun
Also Rises there is still a passing remark about Henrys bicycle, which in the
manuscript referred to Henry Jamess apocryphal groin injury similar to the
one of Jake Barnes. Perkins advised Hemingway: As for Henry James, you
know how we feel about it. . . . this town and Boston are full of people who

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Michael S. Reynolds

knew him and who cannot regard him as you do, i.e. as an historical character.
There are four right in this office who were his friends. . . . Then as to the fact
of a groin injury, I have inquired into it and it is at most, extremely doubtful.
Van Wyck Brooks who questioned everyone who knew James, does not believe it, nor anyone here. There are a variety of rumors, and many obvious lies,
but no certainty.27 Hemingway removed Jamess name, finally admitting that
it was a mistake to put real people in a book. He vowed not to make the same
mistake again. That same year, 1926, John Dos Passos criticized Hemingways
use of actual people and names in his writing. Hemingway agreed with Dos
Passos. He explained that in Torrents of Spring he was satirizing that type of
writing, but concluded that it was still a bad thing to do.28
When Hemingway began the holograph manuscript of A Farewell to
Arms in the spring of 1928, he consciously avoided actual names and people
wherever he could. He could not altogether eliminate prominent names in
an historical novel, but people like King Emmanuel and the Duke of Aosta
are mentioned only in passing and are kept well offstage. The central characters were based on real people, but they were not meant to be those people.
Hemingway used people he knew as models much as a painter will use a
model. Frederic Henry is not Ernest Hemingway at the Italian front, for
Frederic is no nineteenyearold novice. Catherine Barkley may possess some
of the physical features of a nurse in Milan but she also resembles several
other women Hemingway had known.
Guy Hickok, who read the novel in manuscript, recognized something of
Hemingways second wife, Pauline, in the character of Catherine: How is Pauline as a blonde? She talks a lot like Catherine as a brunette. Hennaedup she
would be Catherine if you could stretch her up heightwise a few inches.29
Scott Fitzgerald, however, was determined to see Ernest doing the same
sort of novel he had done in The Sun Also Rises: You are seeing him Frederic
in a sophisticated way as now you see yourself then but youre still seeing her
as you did in 1917 through a 19yearolds eyesin consequence unless you
make her a bit fatuous occasionally the contrast jarseither the writer is a
simple fellow or she is Elenora Duse disguised as a Red Cross nurse. In one
moment you expect her to prophesy the second battle of the Marneas you
probably did then.30
Apparently Hemingway had discussed the plot of the novel with
Fitzgerald before he began writing it, but he did not let the older author
criticize the manuscript as he had done with The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald
did not see the war novel until it was in typescript. Yet it is interesting to note
that Fitzgerald assumes that Hemingway was in Italy in 1917 and that the
experience of the book is largely autobiographical. Although Hemingway did
not correct Fitzgeralds assumption, neither did he encourage anyone to read

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the novel as autobiography. The best part of the novel, he later told Perkins,
was invented.

No t e s
1. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners,
1969), pp. 2038.
2. Ibid., pp. 4156.
3. Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 4th ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 49.
4. Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1966), p. 290.
5. Carlos Baker, Hemingways Italia, NYTBR (Jan. 23, 1966), p. 2.
6. Baker, A Life Story, p. 184.
7. Malcolm Cowley, Not Yet Demobilized, NYHTBR (Oct. 6, 1929), p.
6; Percy Hutchinson, Love and War in the Pages of Mr. Hemingway, NYTBR
(Sept. 29, 1929), p. 5; Henry S. Canby, Chronicle and Comment, Bookman, 70
(Feb., 1930), p. 644.
8. Canby, p. 644.
9. Denis Marion, LAdieu aux Armes, Nouvelle Revue Franaise, 41 (Oct.,
1933), p. 632.
10. Umberto Morra, A Farewell to Arms di Ernest Hemingway, Solaria, 2
(1930), rpt. in Antologia di Solaria, ed. Enzo Siciliano (Milan: Editore Lerici, 1958),
pp. 377380.
11. Giacomo Antonini, Addio alle Armi Venticinque Anni Dopo, La Fiera
Letteraria, 9, no. 1 (March 21, 1954), pp. 12.
12. Alberto Rossi, Ernest Hemingway e la guerra italiana, La Nuova
Stampa, Anno x, num. 261 (Nov. 2, 1954), p. 3.
13. Audre Hanneman, Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
14. Ernest Hemingway, A Veteran Visits Old Front, Toronto Daily Star (July
22, 1922), p. 7.
15. Quoted in Baker, A Life Story, pp. 131132.
16. Ernest Hemingway, Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,
originally published in Esquire, 4 (October, 1935), 21, 174a, 174b; rpt. in By-Line:
Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Scribners, 1967), p. 215.
17. Hemingway, Introduction, A Farewell to Arms, illustrated ed. (New York:
Scribners, 1948), pp. viiviii.
18. George Plimpton, The Art of Fiction, XXI: Ernest Hemingway, Paris
Review, 5 (Spring, 1958), p. 85.
19. See Baker, Writer as Artist, p. 12; Baker, A Life Story, pp. 108110; M. S.
Reynolds, Two Hemingway Sources for In Our Time, Studies in Short Fiction, 9
(Winter, 1972), pp. 8184.
20. Ernest Hemingway, ed., Men at War (New York: Crown Publishers,
1942), p. xvii.
21. There is an Italian spelling for the town: Gorizia; and an Austrian spelling:
Goritzia. In 1922, Hemingway used the Austrian spelling. In the first draft and holo
graph revisions of the AFTA manuscript, he used the Austrian spelling throughout.

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Michael S. Reynolds

The change to the Italian spelling occurred in the typescript. By the time the novel
was serialized in Scribners Magazine the spelling was Gorizia.
22. Hemingway, A Veteran Visits Old Front, TDS (July 22, 1922), p. 7.
23. Hemingway, Preface, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribners, 1964).
24. Hemingway letter to Carlos Baker, June 11, 1953.
25. Ibid.
26. Hemingway letter to Scott Fitzgerald, Feb., 1926.
27. Perkins letter to Hemingway, July 20, 1926.
28. Hemingway to Dos Passos, Feb. 16, 1927.
29. Guy Hickok to Hemingway, July 26, 1929.
30. Scott Fitzgerald to Hemingway, undated, 1929.

B ernard O ldsey

The Sense of an Ending

he final act of enclosure in A Farewell to Arms consists of less than one

page of print, just under two hundred words. In its own way, however, as
a dramatic piece of tightly rendered fiction, it proves to be as structurally
sound and effective as the evocative overture (Chapter I) with which the
novel opens.1 Long admired critically, this conclusion has become one of the
most famous segments in American fictionhaving been used in college
classrooms across the land as a model of compositional compression, and as
an object lesson in auctorial sweat, in what Horace called the labor of the
file. The undocumented story of how hard Hemingway worked to perfect
the ending of A Farewell to Arms approached the level of academic legend.
Some tellers of the tale said he wrote the conclusion fifty times, some as
high as ninety; others used the safer method of simply saying Hemingway
wrote it, rewrote it, and re-rewrote it. Carlos Baker, in his otherwise highly
detailed biography, says of the matter only that Between May 8th and 18th
[1929] he rewrote the conclusion several times in the attempt to get it exactly
right.2 In their inventory of the papers available to them at the time, Philip
Young and Charles Mann mention only one alternate conclusion separately,
and what appears to be either one or two others attached to the galleys for
the periodical publication of the novel. 3 One of these is the version Baker
published in a collection called Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major
In Hemingways Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms (University Park, Pa.: Penn
State University Press, 1979), pp. 7183. Copyright 1979 Penn State University Press.

83

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Bernard Oldsey

Novels under the heading of The Original Conclusion of A Farewell to

Arms.4 For reasons that will become clear later, this version should be
referred to more precisely as The Original Scribners Magazine Conclusion,
for although it was indeed the first to be set in galleys for that publication,
it was preceded in composition by at least one other version in handwritten
form, and probably more.5
As the papers now indicate, Hemingway deserved to be taken pretty
much at his word when he told George Plimpton he had written the conclusion thirty-nine times. Depending upon a number of small variables, and
upon what one is willing to call an attempt at conclusion, there are between
thirty-two and forty-one elements of conclusion in the Hemingway Collection of the John F. Kennedy Library.6 These appear in typescript and in handwritten form, and run from one or two sentences to as many as three pages
in length. Some of the short elements show up again in the fuller attempts,
helping to produce combination endings that consist of fragments arranged
in varying alignments. There is, of course, no guarantee that Hemingway did
not write even more variations: some could have been lost, destroyed, forgotten. But those that exist in the Hemingway Collection represent a rich fund
of critical information capable of revealing the process of rejection-selection
that the author went through to reach the sense of an ending.7 Not only can
we see in this scattered process the thematic impulses which run through the
novel and which the author was tempted to tie off in many of these concluding attempts; but we find in it the figurative seven-eighths of Hemingways
famous iceberg that floats beneath the surface of the art object. In one sense,
most of the concluding attempts that are to be examined here may be considered as artistically subsumed under what finally became the ending of A
Farewell to Arms. Understanding them should lead to a better understanding
of it, and the novel as a whole.
All of the conclusions in the Hemingway Collection presuppose Catherines death. Hemingway chose to present the actual death in understated,
summary fashion at the very end of the penultimate section of the last chapter: It seems she had one hemorrhage after another . . . and it did not take her
very long to die.8 Presumably, that summarization did not take much writing
effort. In itself Catherines death, although beautifully prepared for in the
first three quarters of the last chapter, is not one of Hemingways moments
of artistic truthlike the flat cinematic projection of Maeras death in In Our
Time, or the elaborate mythic flight of Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
It contains none of the asyntactical eloquence of Frederics near-death, when
he feels his soul slip out of his body like a handkerchief from a pocket and
then return to corporeal life (p. 57). This is, after all, Frederic Henrys story,
and it is his reaction to Catherines death that had to be depicted with revelatory force. All of the variant conclusions that Hemingway wrote for the novel

The Sense of an Ending

85

are attempts to epitomize Henrys traumatized perceptionfrom which,

years later, the story unfolds.
Most of the variant attempts fall into natural clusters that can be referred to as: (1) The Nada Ending, (2) The Fitzgerald Ending, (3) The Religious Ending, (4) The Live-Baby Ending, (5) The Morning-After Ending,
(6) The Funeral Ending, (7) The Original Scribners Magazine Ending, and
(8) The Ending. But a final grouping of (9) Miscellaneous Endings is needed
initially to accommodate five brief attempts that have little in common with
each other or any of those in the previously mentioned categories.
These five are all single-page holographs, four mere fragments. Two
echo material in Chapter I by mixing rain with the thought of many men and
women dying in wartime; and they conclude that knowing about the death of
many is no consolation to someone mourning the death of a specific person.
Another reaches back to Henrys nearly fatal wounding, as he compares the
traumatic effect of Catherines death on him with that produced by the physical wound: in both instances the numbness wears off and only pain remains.
Still another of these miscellaneous attempts makes use of the old saying See
Naples and die, concluding bitterly that Naples is a hateful place, a part of
that unlucky peninsula which is Italy. The last, and most interesting, of these
attempts briefly entertains the notion of suicide: the narrator realizes he can
end his life just as arbitrarily as he writes finis to his narrative; but he decides
not to and later is not sorry about his decision. Through the first four of
these attempts, and a number of others later, we can observe Hemingway trying to find the right linear motif with which to tie off the novelclimatological, psychological, or geographical. With the introduction of suicide in the
fifth, however, we are reminded that the end of any novel, not just this, is in a
sense a prefigurement of the novelists death. All of the attempts to conclude
a novel mirror the life choices of the creator; and the conclusion of a life can
be as arbitrary and/or artistically appropriate as the conclusion of a novel.
The Nada Ending is represented by three fragmentary attempts to express Henrys sense of being-and-nothingness after Catherines death. His
mind is stunned and produces only a negative response, a form of nada. He
senses that everything is goneall their loveand will never be again. But
at the bottom of one of these handwritten fragments an added note declares,
with some of the ambiguity found at the end of A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place, that nothing is lost. The bluntest of the three attempts simply states
that there is nothing left to the story, and that all the narrator can promise is
that we all die.9 This nihilistic attitude echoes Henrys earlier statement made
to a hungry animal nosing around a garbage can: There isnt anything, dog.
And it is this same negative tonality, expressed dramatically, which dominates
the ending Hemingway eventually devised for the novel.

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Although related to the nada group, The Fitzgerald Ending deserves

separate discussion because of the peculiar editorial circumstances surrounding it. As is now well known, F. Scott Fitzgerald helped Hemingway considerably in choosing the proper opening of The Sun Also Rises. What has not
been well known is that he also advised Hemingway editorially on a number
of matters in A Farewell to Arms: Item 77 in the Hemingway Collection consists of nine handwritten pages of Fitzgeralds comments on the typescript of
the novel.10 He so admired one passage in the book that he noted it in the
typescript as being one of the most beautiful pages in all English literature;
and later, in his last note on the novel to Hemingway, he wrote: Why not end
the book with that wonderful paragraph on p. 241 [pp. 258259 in print]. It is
the most eloquent in the book and would end it rather gently and well. The
passage referred to is that in which Henry, in Chapter XXXIV, contemplates
how the world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave,
and concludes If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but
there will be no special hurry. Hemingway did try to use the passage as an
ending, once by itself in holograph and once with other elements in polished
typescript. As we know, he rejected both possibilities and kept the passage
intact within the novel. In a letter to Hemingway (dated June 1, 1934), defending his own Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald shed much light on his own
sense of an ending, as well as Hemingways and Joseph Conrads:
The theory back of it I got from Conrads preface to The Nigger,
that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering
aftereffects in the readers mind. . . . The second contribution . . . was
your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the
very end of A Farewell to Arms. I remember that your first draftor
at least the first one I sawgave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book
summary . . . and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst
of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and
tag off with that; you were against this idea because you felt that
the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high
emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no
aesthetic reason for thisnevertheless, you convinced me.11

The Religious Ending represents one of Hemingways least negative

variants and perhaps the most potentially incongruous. Had any form of this
conclusion been retained, A Farewell to Arms would have emerged with a
much different emphasis in themeone depending heavily upon a passage
(in Chapter III) that has puzzled many readers. This is the place where Henry
tries to express the evanescent wisdom of the priest: He had always known
what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget.

The Sense of an Ending

87

But I did not know that then, although I learned it later (p. 14). What is the
it which Henry learns, and when does he learn it? The usual interpretation
stresses it as love: the priests love of God, Frederics love for Catherine; and
the connection between agape and eros. But Hemingways experiments with
religious conclusions for the novel reveal the it of the priest as transcending
any mundane love, which can be snuffed out by death. Under these circumstances, the it that Henry learns later is that everything will be all right if,
as these fragments indicate, you believe in God and love God. No one, the
narrator concludes, can take God away from the priest, and thus the priest is
happy. With such a conclusion the priest would have emerged as the supreme
mentor of this Bildungsroman, not Rinaldi, Count Greffi, or even Catherine.
However, a question imbedded in two of these religious attempts helps to
explain why this kind of conclusion was rejected. Henry wonders how much
of what the priest has is simply luck, how much is wisdomand how do you
achieve what the priest has if you are not born that way? It is, eventually, a
question of deterministic grace.
Another fairly positive ending that Hemingway dropped is one in which
Frederic and Catherines child lives, instead of dying as it does in the novel.
Two of these Live-Baby Endings were written to be inserted into the penultimate section of the last chapter, to precede Catherines death. But the third
makes it clear that Hemingway attempted to provide an ending in which the
fact of birth, of new life, mitigates death. In this version Henry finds it difficult to talk about the boy without feeling bitter toward him, but concludes
philosophically that there is no end except death and birth is the only beginning. Stoic as these words may sound, they nevertheless tend to mitigate the
deeper gloom produced in the novel by the death of both mother and child.
In several senses The Live-Baby Ending would have meant another story;
and with a touch of editorial wisdom reflecting that of the author, Henry
realizes It is not fair to start a new story at the end of an old one. . . .
The concluding element Hemingway worked on longest and hardest
was one built on a delayed reaction, The Morning-After Ending. In holograph and typescript form, ten variations on this conclusion exist as more or
less discrete elements; five are incorporated into combination conclusions,
including The Original Scribners Magazine Ending, as published by Baker,
and both the original and first-revised conclusions, as represented in Michael Reynolds Hemingways First War.12 In all of these Frederic returns, after
Catherines death, to the hotel where they had been staying: after some time
he falls asleep because he is so tired; waking to a spring morning, he sees the
sun shining in through the window and for a moment is unaware of what has
happened. The moment of realizing Catherine is gonesomething of a dull,
truncated epiphanyis rendered in two ways. In most versions, including
those published by Baker and Reynolds, Henry merely experiences a delayed

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Bernard Oldsey

responsethen suddenly to realize what had happened. But in other versions his recognition of his predicament is stimulated by a burning light
bulb: seeing it still lit in the daylight brings double illumination. Through
this simple device, Hemingway placed Frederic Henry among those other
protagonists of his who, like children, have trouble with the darkincluding
the Old Man in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, the Lieutenant in Now I
Lay Me, and Nick Adams in A Way Youll Never Be, who confesses, I
cant sleep without a light of some sort. Thats all I have now. His words
could stand for Frederic Henry in these versions of the conclusion. He too,
earlier in the novel, gives utterance to nocturnal blues: I know that the night
is not the same as the day: that all things are different . . . the night can be
a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with
Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an
even better time (p. 258). Without Catherine, all that is left is a light bulb
burning in the night, announcing on the morning after that she is dead.
In one instance Hemingway employed The Morning-After Ending as
a transitional device to achieve The Funeral Ending. The initial material of
this one-page holograph is essentially the same as that described in the Baker
version, but this variant does not end with the flat statement of that is the
end of my story. Instead, Hemingway here makes one of his first attempts
to conclude with an obverse-iteration method: Henry says that he could tell
about his meeting with the undertaker and the business of burial in a foreign
country, but, the implication is, as the sentence trails off, he will not. The
same kind of obverse iteration is incorporated into the two other attempts at
this funeral conclusion: people die and they have to be buried, but the narrator does not have to tell about the burying, or the resulting sorrow. Henry tells
ussomewhat reversing the earlier notion of suicidethat in writing you
have a certain choice that you do not have in life.
It is impossible to state with certainty what the exact order of composition was for all the variant elements of conclusion, since they are undated.13 But there are good indications that the combining form of The
Original Scribners Magazine Ending was the penultimate version. For one
thing, most of the variations in this group (five of eight) are highly polished
typescripts. For another, these versions combine many of the previously
mentioned attempts as contributing elementsincluding the morningafter idea, as well as the funeral, suicide, lonely nights, the Fitzgerald suggestion, and the obverse-iteration method of stating-but-not-stating what
happened after that particular night in March nineteen hundred and eighteen. Most significantly, one version of this combining conclusion very
nearly became the ultimate oneto the extent of having been set in galleys
for the serial publication of the novel.

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89

Hemingway scribbled a note to hold matters on this conclusion, however, and then eventually supplanted it with the dramatic version that we
now have. If he had not done so, A Farewell to Arms would have ended in
the old-fashioned manner of tying up the loose narrative ends in summary
fashion. For in the original galley version Frederic Henry says that he could,
if he wanted to, tell his reader many things that had happened since that
night when Catherine died. He could tell how Rinaldi was cured of syphilis
(answering the question of whether Rinaldi did indeed have the disease);
how the priest functioned in Italy under Mussolini (indicating that this is a
story being told years after its occurrence); how Simmons became an opera
singer; how the loudly heroic Ettore became a Fascist; and how the loyal
Piani became a taxi driver in New York. A variant of this conclusion places
Piani in Chicago instead of New York and hints that something unpleasant
happened to the socialist-deserter Bonello in his home town of Imola. In
all of the variants of this combining ending, however, Henry decides he will
not tell about all of these people, or about himself, since that time in 1918,
because all of that would be another story. This story ends with Catherines
death, or more specifically with the dawn of his awakening to that fact on the
morning after.
Hemingway reached this point in his search for an ending by August
1928. He made some galley adjustments on this combination ending early in
June 1929. But he still was not satisfied; the last phase of his search began,
and on June 24, 1929, almost ten months after completion of the first full
draft of the novel, Hemingway reached The Ending.14 Tracing through all
of the elements of conclusion for A Farewell to Arms in the Hemingway Collection is like accompanying the captain of a vessel who has been searching
through uncharted waters for a singularly appropriate harbor: then suddenly
after all this pragmatic probing there appears the proper terminus to his voyage, and yours, something realized out of a myriad number of possibilities. In
less figurative terms, The Ending emerges suddenly as the product of what
Mark Schorer has aptly called Technique as Discovery.
Even in the very last phase of this process Hemingway continued to
write and rewrite to discover what should be said on the final page of the
novel as a result of what had been said in the preceding three hundred and
forty pages. Including the ultimate choice, there are extant five holographic
variants of The Ending. They are closely related, and they remind us that
Hemingway once said the most difficult thing about writing was getting
the words right. With cross-outs, replacements, realignments, these final five
efforts demonstrate technique as discovery in the most basic sense of getting
the words right, which leads to getting the right message, the right form.
All five are basically alike in form and substance. They are all examples
of the dramatic method of showing, rendering, rather than telling. They all

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Bernard Oldsey

contain the descriptive element of the rain, the dramatic action of clearing
the hospital room and taking leave of Catherines corpse, and the narrative
reflection that none of it is any good. All include the most important sentence in the actual conclusion: It was like saying good-by to a statue. But
they all state these matters in slightly different ways, using different positions
for various phrases and ideas, achieving different emphases and effects. For
example, Hemingway moved the sentence about saying good-by to a statue
around like a piece in a puzzle: in one instance he tried for maximum effect
by restating it as the very last sentence of the novel, but evidently thought
that too obvious and placed it eventually in its penultimate position, where
it is now followed by the line that runs After awhile I went out and left the
hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
Kenneth Burke reads that last sentence as a small masterpiece of understatement and meteorological symbolism: No weeping here, he declares;
Rather stark understatement. Or look again, and do you not find the very
heavens are weeping in his behalf? Burke finds here an echo of Verlaines line
It rains in my heart as it rains on the town.15 This critical hunch receives
support from the most interesting variant of The Ending, which takes from
the heavens a touch of religious consolation. In this version, out of Frederic
Henrys reflections, comes a brief line obviously modeled on the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on. . . . It has poetic lilt and fits in
beautifully with the weather imagery throughout the novel; and at first the
reader is inclined to think Hemingway made the wrong decision in dropping
it from the final ending. But further consideration reveals a sense of craft
wisdom. Having previously rejected The Religious Ending that features the
happiness of the priest, and having depicted the inefficacy of Henrys prayers
for the dying Catherine, the author here remained artistically consistent. In
eliminating even this nub of religious consolation, he obtained the flat, nihilistic, numbing conclusion that the novel now has.16
Here again, in this last instance of rejection as in all of the preceding
instances, we are reminded that Hemingways best fiction is the product not
only of what has been put in but also of what has been left out. Big Two-Hearted
River is perhaps the most obvious example of this propensity in Hemingways
work; it took critics years to fill in the deliberate gaps in that story, by borrowing information from other pieces of Hemingways fiction, in order to get a
full reading of what they sensed was a powerful work of suppressed drama.
Hemingway intuitively understood that sublimated words form part of any
message as uttered, providing as they do a psychological tension and an emotional context for that utterance. He spoke of trying to achieve a fourth and
even a fifth dimension in his fiction, and formulated a synecdochic theory for
the-thing-left-out: I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There
is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know

The Sense of an Ending

91

you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesnt
show.17 Examining some forty attempts at conclusion for A Farewell to Arms
provides a rare inside view of that theory: it reveals what the author knew,
the submerged, suppressed part of the message. Moreover, it opens to critical
view an auctorial process of exclusion-inclusion, an exercise of willed choice,
that closely parallels the life-choices of the protagonist-narrator. Thus we can
see that the published conclusion is possessed of an extraordinary tension and
literary power because it sublimates, suppresses, and/or rejects the same things
that Frederic Henry doesincluding religious consolation; hope for the future
and the continuance of life (as reflected in The Live-Baby Ending and in the
summary of characters in the combination endings); the eloquence of courage and beauty (expressed in The Fitzgerald Ending); and even the negative
solution of suicide (suggested in one of the miscellaneous endings). In this
instance, everything that the author and the protagonist knew and eliminated
went into strengthening this tip of the iceberg.
Conceived as it was in the spirit of rejection, the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms is in and of itself a compressed exemplification of the process
of rejection and negation. The only thing that Hemingway retained from all
the preceding attempts at ending the novel is the core of The Nada Ending.
He eventually wrote finis to the story by bringing its materials down to a fine
point of nothingness, and thus left the reader with the same message Frederic Henry gives the hungry dog in the last chapter: There isnt anything,
dog. Within the short space of the one hundred and ninety-seven words
that comprise the conclusion, Hemingway uses nothing three times and a series of some thirteen forms of negation, in various phrases like No. There is
nothing to do, No. . . . Theres nothing to say, and simply No, thank you.
In the process, Frederic Henry rejects the attending physicians explanation
of the Caesarean operation, his offer of aid, and the nurses demand that he
stay out of Catherines room. But the most powerful form of rejection occurs in the final paragraph of the book, when Henry says his last farewell to
arms: But after I got them [the nurses] out and shut the door and turned
off the light it wasnt any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. He
rejects the corpse; it rejects him. Even in this ultimate scene of nullification
Hemingway uses his principle of omission in a subtle manner: he says nothing about Frederics embracing or kissing the statue-like corpse, although
it is a rare reader who does not interpolate some such act. Also, Hemingway does nothing here to remind the reader that with Catherine Lieutenant
Henry had come to accept the night, the darkness, and found that with her
it was an even better time than the day. But now Henry deliberately turns
off the light, as though to test his alliance with Catherine, and finds that the
warmth and companionship of love are inoperative, defunct. We can thus
understand why, in many of the combination endings, Henry is described as

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Bernard Oldsey

sleeping with the light bulb turned on in the hotel room. Night will never be
a better time for him again.

No t e s
1. As discussed earlier [in Oldseys book], pp. 6566.
2. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969), p. 201. In his Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1952), Baker declares, There is a persistent tradition
that the present ending was rewritten seventeen times before Hemingway got the
corrected galley-proof aboard the boat-train, p. 97.
3. Philip Young and Charles W. Mann, The Hemingway Manuscripts: An
Inventory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), pp. 1112.
Item 5-F in this inventory describes a three-page manuscript ending in which the
baby lives; Item 5-H mentions only that there are Different versions of ending
attached to the four galleys set for the Scribners Magazine publication of the novel;
and Item 5-J merely adds that four more endings of the novel are attached to two
galleys dated June 4, 1929. If this information seems somewhat vague, it should
be said in fairness to Young and Mann that their inventory was meant to be an
interim report, as they declare in their preface, and not the much more elaborate
catalogue . . . that should be made when the papers have reached their permanent
repository.
4. (New York: Scribners, 1962), p. 75.
5. See Hemingway Collection, specifically Item 64 and Item 70: the first is
the manuscript of the novel as first completed; the second is a series of drafts for an
ending (some forty pages in manuscript and typescript). See also Michael Reynolds,
Hemingways First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976), pp. 4648.
6. Item 64 and Item 70, as mentioned in note 5 above.
7. Used with a slightly contradictory connotation in the title of this chapter,
this phrase is borrowed from Frank Kermodes challenging analysis of apocalyptic
literary endings: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967).
8. A Farewell to Arms, Modern Standard Authors edition (New York:
Scribners, 1953), p. 343.
9. This variant has been published in Reynolds study, p. 294.
10. See Philip Young and Charles W. Mann, Fitzgeralds Sun Also Rises:
Notes and Comment, Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1970 (Washington D.C.: NCR
Microcard Editions, 1970), pp. 19. See also Item 77 of the Hemingway Collection,
which contains Fitzgeralds comments on an early form of the novel, most probably
Item 65, the original typescript and setting copy of A Farewell to Arms.
11. As reprinted in George Perkins The Theory of the American Novel (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 334.
12. See note 5 and Reynolds, pp. 4648.
13. There is a date established for Item 64, the manuscript copy of the novel
(see note 14 below), but the great bulk of the variants, found in Item 70, are not
dated.
14. See Reynolds, pp. 50, 285.

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93

15. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, a doublevolume edition (Cleveland: World, 1962); this citation is from the second volume,
p. 850.
16. As the author of this study recently discovered, there is another good
reason for Hemingways dropping this line: it is used by Fitzgerald in the last chapter
of The Great Gatsby, in the funeral scene: Dimly I heard someone murmur Blessed
are the dead that the rain falls on, and then the owl-eyed man said Amen to that
in a brave voice. Whether the line is original or not with Fitzgerald, Hemingway
would have looked overly dependent in using it for similar effect in conclusion.
17. In George Plimptons interview with the author, Ernest Hemingway: The
Art of Fiction XXI, Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958), p. 84.

M illicent B ell

Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor

utobiographic novels are, of course, fictions, constructs of the imagination, even when they seem to incorporate authenticating bits and pieces
of personal history. But all fiction is autobiography, no matter how remote
from the authors experience the tale seems to be; he leaves his mark,
expresses his being, his life, in any tale. A Farewell to Arms can illustrate
both of these statements.
Ernest Hemingways novel is not the autobiography some readers have
thought it. It was not memory but printed source material that supplied
the precise details of its descriptions of historic battle scenes on the Italian
front in World War I. The novels love story is no closer to Hemingways
personal reality. He did go to Italy and see action, but not the action he describes; he did fall in love with a nurse, but she was no Catherine Barkley. A
large amount of the book fulfills the principle expressed in the deleted coda
to Big Two-Hearted River: The only writing that was any good was what
you made up, what you imagined. Still, there is much that must represent
authentic recall in the book. Innumerable small details and a sense of general conditions in battle, the character of the Italian landscape, the Italian
soldier, the ambulance corpsall impressed themselves upon Hemingway
in 1918 in the Dolomite foothills near Schio as surely as they might have
further east around the Tagliamento a year earlier. And there are fetishes
In Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, ed. James Nagel (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984): pp. 113129. Copyright 1984 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System. University of Wisconsin Press.

95

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Millicent Bell

of autobiography, trophies of the personal, chief among these the famous

wounding at Fossalta, which Hemingway often recalled.
Why is this last episode reproduced so exactly as it happenedthe shell
fragments in the legs, the sensation of dying and coming to life, the surgical
sequel? In the coda, Nickwho is Hemingwayhad never seen a jockey
killed when he wrote My Old Man; hed never seen an Indian woman
having a baby like his namesake in Indian Camp. But Hemingway had
been wounded just as Frederic is. The answer may be that it was a trauma
obsessively recurring to mind, irrepressibly present in his writing because of
its crucial, transforming effect upon his life. Still, in the novel the wounding is
not at all transforming, does not provide the occasion for the separate peace
declared by Nick at a similar moment in chapter 6 of In Our Time, often
incorrectly thought to be the novels germ. It does not even cause the novels hero to suffer from sleeplessness afterward, the consequence of a similar
wounding for the narrator of Now I Lay Me, written only two years before
A Farewell to Arms. Perhaps in life as in the novel the wounding was simply
a very striking experience, the young mans first brush with death. But as an
authentic, indelible memory it was deliberate evidence, in any case, that the
fiction was not all made up. Perhaps, then, the authentic wounding is chiefly
a sign, a signature of the authors autobiographic contract with himself.
Hemingways style, his realist pose, suggests, guilefully, that much more
has been borrowed directly from experience than is actually the case. Perhaps
the testimonial incorporation of the real, which guarantees autobiographic
realism, may also be mimicked. When the real is made up to become the
realistic, when the seemingly accidental detail appears to have been stuck
into the narrative for no other reason than that it happened, than that it was
there, the writer has deliberately made it look as though he is yielding to
memory and resisting the tendency of literature to subdue everything to a
system of connected significance. In A Farewell to Arms, as elsewhere in his
writing, Hemingway made the discovery of this secret of realist effect, and
his art, which nevertheless presses toward poetic unity by a powerful if covert
formalist intent, yet seems continually open to irrelevance also. The result is
a peculiar tension requiring the strictest control. Only a manner which conceals implication as severely as Hemingways can nevertheless suggest those
coherences, those rhythmic collocations of mere things, in the manner of
imagist poetry, pretend notation of what the witnessing eye might simply
have chanced to see. And this restraint is reinforced by deliberate avoidance
of the kind of comment that might impose significance or interpretation. It
is even further strengthened by the often-noted qualities of Hemingwayan
syntax, the simple or compound declaratives lacking subordination, and the
vocabulary high in nouns and verbs and low in qualifiers. The frequency of
the impersonal passive voice that presents events simply as conditions, as in

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the many sentences that begin with There were, suppresses not only the
sense of agency but the evaluating presence of the observer. If, despite these
effects, there is often poetic meaningfulness it is also true that the poetic is
sometimes renounced altogether and the realistic detail maintains its irrelevance, refusing any signification in order to affirm the presence of the actual,
whether or not truly remembered, reported, historical.
But this stylistic contest only reflects the struggle of the writer between
the impulses to tell it as it was and to shape and pattern a story; it is not
that struggle itself. The realistic style is, in fact, most conspicuous and most
successful in the most invented parts of the book, the war scenes. It is not so
evident in those other scenes where Hemingway draws upon memorythe
Milan and Switzerland sections. Hemingway had been a patient in the Red
Cross hospital in Milan and had spent convalescent weeks in the city; and
he had taken vacation tours in the Alpine lake region. But the action situated in those places in the novel has no authenticity to match that of the
great Caporetto chapter in which Frederic participates in events Hemingway
had not. Still, it is the war scenes, probablyto turn our paradox about once
morethat express Hemingways deepest feelings by way of metaphor, his
sense of the war as an objective correlative of his state of mind. The love
affair located in familiar, remembered scenes fails of authenticity though it
takes something from the writers experiences with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, and something from his love for Hadley Richardson, and even Pauline Pfeiffers caesarian operation; it succeeds less well than the invented war
scenes in achieving either the effect of realism or the deeper autobiography of
metaphor. It is as the latter that it can, however, be explained.
Any first-person story must imitate the autobiographic situation, but
there is particular evidence that Hemingway gave his narrator his own sense
of the difficulty of reconciling Wahrheit and Dichtung. The novelists struggles
to achieve an appropriate ending to his book are visible in the manuscript
drafts at the John F. Kennedy Library. They show that his chief problem was
that he felt both that a novel needed formal closure and also that life was not
like that. He rejected, in the end, the attempt to pick up dropped threads
and bring Rinaldi and the priest back into the narrative from which they had
been absent since the end of chapter 26, a little beyond the novels midpoint.
It may be argued that these two companions de la guerre are felt even in their
absence, that there are no dropped threads, the priest in particular being absorbed into the transformed conception of love which the American lieutenant and the English nurse discover in the later portions of the book. But there
is really no such absorption; Frederic and Catherine remain very much what
they were at the beginning, this mentor and the skeptical doctor both being
left behind. Of the three people of any importance in this story to whom
Hemingway referred in the rejected opening for chapter 10, only Catherine

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persists. Hemingway must have decided this made an endingthe tightening isolation of his hero requires the loss of the larger human worldbut in
one of the discarded drafts he permits Frederic to express the misgivings of
his creator. I could tell how Rinaldi was cured of the syphilis. . . . I could tell
how the priest in our mess lived to be a priest in Italy under Fascism, the
pseudoautobiographic narrator observes. But he knows that a story must end
somewhere. That he realizes that his closure cannot be complete is due to his
awareness that life does not have endings.
Things happen all the time. Everything blunts and the world keeps
on. You get most of your life back like goods recovered from a fire. It
all keeps on and then it keeps on. It never stops for you. Sometimes
it stops when you are still alive. You can stop a story anytime. Where
you stop is the end of that story. The rest goes on and you go on
with it. On the other hand you have to stop a story. You have to stop
at the end of whatever it was you were writing about.

The rejected passage can be read not merely as a device to excuse the odd
shape of the novel but as a reflection of Hemingways personal dilemma,
his desire to respect the claim of art and also to get back his own past like
goods recovered from a fire.
Getting back his life by writing fiction was not, in this case, a matter
of endings, of plot. The indeterminacy of remembered experience does not
matter, because the coherence of events is not so important as the unity of
the mind which is the container for them. If Hemingway was to fulfill the autobiographic expectation, the promise made by authentic transcriptions like
the Fossalta wounding, it would not be by trying to tell, literally, the story
of his past. The novelist wrote about himself, and perhaps never so truly as in
A Farewell to Arms, but he did so by projecting, lyrically, an inner condition.
Mood and tone, not events, provide unity, and these were more intensely the
concomitants of the present life of the writer than of his younger self. The
novel is about neither love nor war; it is about a state of mind, and that state
of mind is the authors.
That plot is not dominant in A Farewell to Arms has not been properly
recognized. Critics who have stressed the prevalence of poetic metaphors in
the novel have failed, on the whole, to see that such patterns establish its spatial composition, minimize progressive effects. In fact, an unvarying mood,
established by the narrative voice, dominates everything it relates, bathes uniformly all the images and levels events which are seen always in one way
only. That the principal descriptive elementsriver, mountains, dust or mud,
and above all, rainare all present in the opening paragraphs suggests not
so much that later scenes are being predicted as that the subsequent pages

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will disclose nothing that is not already evident in the consciousness that has
begun its self-exhibition.
The famous wounding is no turning point in the journey of that consciousness. But even the later separate peace in chapter 32 after Frederics
immersion in the Tagliamento is not really a change of direction, a peaking
of the plot, though Hemingways hero does say as he lies on the floor of the
flatcar that takes him to Milan, You were out of it now. You had no more
obligation. In chapter 7, even before his wounding, it should be remembered,
he has already said, I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have
anything to do with me. It is impossible to tell at what point this narrator
has acquired his conviction of separateness amounting to alienation from the
events which carry him along the stream of time.
By the time he turns away from the war at the Tagliamento in October
1917, Frederic will have had two years in which to acquire the apathy of war
weariness. But this is not his malady. Already on the opening page, in 1915,
the voice that speaks to us exhibits that attitude psychoanalysts call blunting of affect, the dryness of soul which underlies its exquisite attentiveness.
One has heard of the relish of sensation implied in this and other passages
of descriptive writing by Hemingway. But relish is too positive a word for
the studied emotional distance from the perceived world which is in effect here. For the view from Gorizia across the Isonzo, toward the passing
troops and the changing weather, this narrator seems hardly to feel anything
beyond a minimal things went very badly. An alienated neutrality governs
the reiterated passives, the simple declaratives. There were big guns. . . .
There was fighting. . . . There were mists over the river. . . . There were small
gray motor cars. The next year (chapter 2) is the same. There were many
victories. . . . The fighting was in the next mountains. . . . The whole thing
was going well. . . . The war was changed. The different character of military
events makes for no change in the tone. We are prepared for the personality
who emerges into view as he describes his leave. He had not gone to Abruzzi
but had spent drunken nights when you knew that that was all there was,
and he had known the not knowing and not caring in the night, sure that
this was all . . . suddenly to care very much, swinging from not caring to
caring and back again, from affectlessness to affect and then again to its loss.
If there is something that transcends this alternation, the ecstasy of either
love or religion, it is so fugitive as to be almost unnameable: If you have had
it you know. . . . He, the priest, had always known what I did not know, what,
when I learned it, I was always able to forget.
Always is an important word here. There is no hint that Frederic has
at any time had a beginning in illusion, that he ever started out like Stephen
Cranes Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage (something of a model for
A Farewell to Arms) with a naive belief in exalted meanings. The well-known

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passage I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice,
and the expression in vain is not the culmination of a process by which these
concepts have withered. His embarrassment goes as far back as he can remember. He has had it always. Gino was a patriot, Frederic continues, so he said
things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understand
his being a patriot. He was born one. And the opposite attitude, disbelief in
such things, may also be inborn. Rinaldi has told Frederic that for him there
are only two thingsdrink and sexand his work. Frederic hopes that he will
get other things but the doctor says, No. We never get anything. We are born
with all we have and we never learn. If Frederic may be conceived of as having been also born with all he has, this explains why he is described as having
enlisted in the ambulance corps for no reason at all, unlike Hemingway who
was swept into the wave of American enthusiasm to aid the Allies. Frederic just
happened to be already in Italy when the war broke out. He had been studying
architecture. He has never had any belief in the big words. Why did you do it?
asks Catherine, referring to his enlistment. I dont know. . . . There isnt always
an explanation for everything, he answers.
And yet this sufferer from blunted affect can fall in love. It is one of
the givens of the story, though it seems to demand a capacity which, like
the emotion of patriotism, he was born without. When I saw her I was in
love with her, he says when Catherine appears again at the hospital. I had
not wanted to fall in love with anyone. But God knows I had. Catherine,
as well, had experienced this hardly credible conversion. Although we never
get so direct a view of her mental operations this is Frederics story, after
allshe appears, in the earlier scenes, to be as incapacitated as Hemingways other English nurse who has lost a fianc in the war, Brett Ashley.
There is more than a hint that she too suffers the dissociation of feeling
from sensation that accounts for her unfocused sexuality when Frederic first
makes love to her. But now she feels. The raptures of both lovers, however,
are curiously suspect.
Frederic has only delusively attached himself to an otherness. Far from
the wars inordinate demand upon his responses, he has been converted to
feeling in the isolation of his hospital bed, where, like a baby in its bassinet,
he is totally passive, tended and comforted by female caretakers, the nurses,
and particularly by this one. The image is regressive, and the ministering of
Catherine, who looks after all his needs, including sexual, while he lies passive, is more maternal than connubial. The relation that now becomes the
center of the novel is, indeed, peculiar enough to make us question it as a
representation of adult love. More often noted than Frederics passivity is
the passivity of Catherine in this love affair, a passivity which has irritated
readers (particularly female readers) because it seems to be a projection of
male fantasies of the ideally submissive partner. It results from her desire to

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please. She is a sort of inflated rubber woman available at will to the onanistic dreamer. There is, in fact, a masturbatory quality to the love of each. The
union of these two is a flight from outer reality and eventually from selfhood,
which depends upon a recognition of the other; the selfhood that fails to find
its definition in impingement upon the world at large and the establishment
of distinction from it eventually proves incapable of recognizing the alien in
the beloved and therefore the independent in itself. The otherness that Frederic and Catherine provide for one another is not enough to preserve their
integral selves, and while the sounds of exteriority become more and more
muffled in the novel, their personalities melt into one another. It is for this
reason that Hemingways novel, far from being the Romeo and Juliet he once
carelessly called it, is more comparable to Antony and Cleopatra, a play which
shows that the world is not well lost for love, though nothing, of course,
can be further from the masterful images of Shakespeares adult lovers than
Hemingways pitiful pair.
Affective failure, then, shows itself not merely in the war sections of the
novel but in the parts where one would imagine it to have been transcended,
the love story of Catherine and Frederic. Catherine constantly reminds her
lover of her resolution not to offer him otherness but to collapse her own selfhood into his. She asks what a prostitute does, whether she says whatever the
customer wants her to, even I love you. She will outdo the prostitute: But
I will. Ill say just what you wish and Ill do what you wish and then you will
never want any other girls, will you. . . . I want what you want. There isnt any
me any more. Just what you want. The idyll of their Milan summer is spent
in such games as this: We tried putting thoughts in the other ones head
while we were in different rooms. It seemed to work sometimes but that was
probably because we were thinking the same thing anyway. She refuses his
offer to marry her, and when he says I wanted it for you replies, there isnt
any me. Im you. Dont make up a separate me.
Their solitariness deux is only emphasized by their occasional contacts
with others who are outside the war, those met in the Milan cafes or at the
racetrack who are not the true alienated but the self-serving and parasitic, and
even by their encounter with the genuine war hero, Ettore, who is wounded
in the foot, like Frederic, and has five medals, and whom they cannot stand.
After she becomes pregnant, Catherine says, Theres only us two and in the
world theres all the rest of them. If anything comes between us were gone
and then they have us. When the time comes for him to leave for the front,
they walk past a couple embracing under a buttress of the cathedral, and she
will not agree that they are like themselves. Nobody is like us, Catherine
said. She did not mean it happily. Not surprisingly, they both are orphans of a
sort. Catherine has a father but he has gout, she says to Frederic; You wont
ever have to meet him. Frederic has only a stepfather, and, he tells her, You

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wont have to meet him. When they are waiting for the birth of their baby in
Switzerland, she asks him about his family: Dont you care anything about
them? He replies, I did, but we quarrelled so much it wore itself out.
Book 3, the justly praised Caporetto section, returns Frederic to Gorizia
where others have spent a different sort of summer. Rinaldi, depressed, overworked, perhaps syphilitic, says, This is a terrible war, baby, drinks too much,
and is impatient of Frederics acquisition of a sacred subject. The priest tells
him how the terrible summer has made the major gentle. No one any longer
believes in victory. But Frederic confesses that he himself believes in neither
victory nor defeat. He believes, he says, in sleep. It is more than a joke, even
though in a moment he apologizes that I said that about sleep meaning
nothing. The regressive process, the withdrawal from reality, the surrender
of complex personal being, the limitation of relationship to that with another
who is really only a mirror of self approaches more and more the dreamless
sleep of apathy, the extremity of ennui. There is a suggestion of the pathologic
in the I was deadly sleepy with which the chapter ends.
The retreat is reported by a sensibility already asleep, by an emotional
apparatus already itself in retreat from the responsibilities of response. The
houses were badly smashed but things were very well organized and there
were signboards everywhere. However much this sounds like irony to us,
irony is not intended by the speaker, who does not mean more by saying less.
His downward adjustment of feeling is the one often made by soldiersor by
concentration camp victims, or long-term prisonersby which emotions are
reduced to the most rudimentary since the others have become insupportable.
His battle-weary companions express their own reduction by a preoccupation with food. The entire retreat is a massed legitimization of apathy and a
symbol of it.
Frederics affectlessness is climaxed by his cold-blooded shooting
of one of the Italian sergeants who has refused to obey his order to move
the stalled ambulance. I shot three times and dropped one, he observes,
as though describing the pursuit of game, and Bonello then takes the pistol
and finishes him, as a hunting companion might finish off an animal still
quivering where it has fallen. One may say that this is simply warShermans
warand feeling has no place in it. But this does not make it less shocking
that the perceiving hero is so matter-of-fact. Even Bonello expresses a motive: he is a socialist, and all his life he has wanted to kill a sergeant, he tells
Frederic, who expresses no personal motive at all, and who has never felt that
it was his war. Yet for giving up his part in it he has also no special motive.
His case is not like that of the demoralized soldiers who are flinging down
their arms and shouting that they want to go home. He cannot go home. And
now a profoundly significant flash of memory comes to him as he rests in the
hay of a barn:

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103

The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away
all the years between. We had lain in the hay and talked and shot
sparrows with an air-rifle when they perched in the triangle cut
high in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year
they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried
tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You
could not go back.

The separate peace was made long ago. Again we must note the reference
to a congenital disengagement when he says with what only looks like a
newly acquired minimalism, I was not made to think, I was made to eat. My
God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine. Removing his uniform
after his escape, he strips himself of the last vestige of social self. He no
longer can interest himself in the war news, as he had in the earlier Milan
section, and does not give us summaries of military events. I had a paper
but I did not read it because I did not want to read about the war. I was going
to forget the war he says at the beginning of chapter 34. It is now that he
says, I had made a separate peace. Dont talk about the war, he tells the
barman at the hotel. And he reflects, The war was a long way away. Maybe
there wasnt any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for
me. But how committed to this war has he ever been?
The rest is a fugue in the technical psychiatric sense of a period during which the patient, often suffering loss of memory, begins another life
from which all his past has been drained. Thus, the all for love that remains for Frederic and Catherine is qualified by the lovers knowledge that
the whole empire of normal being has been surrendered. Lets not think of
anything, says Catherine. The lover boasts that he has no wish to be separate from his beloved: All other things were unreal. He tells her, My life
used to be full of everything. Now if you arent with me I havent a thing in
the world. Their universe of two is reducing itself further, and their games
continue to suggest this constriction. He might let his hair grow longer, she
suggests, and she might cut hers short so that even their sexual difference
may be lessened. Then wed both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much
I want to be you too. He says, Were the same one, and she, I want us to
be all mixed up. . . . I dont live at all when Im not with you. He replies, Im
no good when youre not there. I havent any life at all any more.
These scenes are a drift toward death, which is why the novel must end
in death, Catherines and the babys, though Hemingway considered allowing
the child to survive. Such a survival would have contradicted all that has gone
before by introducing a new otherness when its parents are losing the otherness of each other. The two lovers already live on the margin of life. Count
Greffi is an even more mythological figure than Mippipopolous in The Sun

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Also Rises, whom he resembles. The very old man, so close to death, is a fit sentinel upon that border they are about to cross before they pass, by a symbolic
boat voyage, out of Italy. Their Switzerland is not on the map, notwithstanding the fact that it resembles the Switzerland of Hemingways vacation tours.
In their chalet, wrapped in the cottony blanket of the winter snow, cared for
by their good-natured landlord and his wife, whose lives have a reality with
which they make no connection, and in contact with no one else, they are
united as before in his hospital bed. Their destiny is out of their own hands
as they become, quite literally, patients awaiting surgery, playing bedgames.
Perhaps Frederic will pass the time by growing a beard. Their loss of connection with human modes of being produces fantasies of an animal identity,
like that of the fox they see in the snow who sleeps with his brush wrapped
about his face, curled in the regressive fetal position. What would they do if
they had tails like the fox? They would have special clothes made, or live in a
country where it wouldnt make any difference to have a foxs tail. Catherine
says, truly, We live in a country where nothing makes any difference. Isnt it
grand how we never see anyone? The country is, of course, the country of the
dead, toward which she is bound.
If indeed all fiction is autobiography, no special demonstration is required to support the idea that A Farewell to Arms expresses the authors inner being, his secret life. Yet there is particular reason to suppose this in the
case of this novel which is the presentation of a state of mind, a mood and
condition of being. These, it may be arguable, belonged to the writer himself
at the time of writing. As a war novel, it is curiously late. In 1929, American
society was preoccupied with other things than its memories of the battles of
the First World War. Hemingway, already the author of a novel dealing with
a later period and married for the second time, had come a long way from the
naive nineteen-year-old of 1918. Any such analysis is speculative, but there is
reason to suppose that for the writer as for Frederic Henry the barn was gone
where he had lain in the hay as a boy: You could not go back. This realization must have been particularly acute when this novel was being written.
Since 1925 his life had been one of personal turmoil. He had found himself
in love with Pauline Pfeiffer, forced to decide between her and the woman
whom he still claimed also to love and who had been, he would declare, a
faultless wife. In 1927, he had remarried and, in the following year, while Pauline was pregnant, he was struggling to make progress on this second novel,
plagued by various accidental disastersan eye injury, head cuts from a fallen
skylightsuch as he always seemed prone to. Paulines baby was delivered by
caesarian section after a labor of eighteen hours during a Kansas heat wave.
The first draft of A Farewell to Arms was finished two months later, but before
Hemingway began the task of revision, his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway,

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who had been depressed for some time, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
Beyond the immediate strain and horror of such events must have been
their power to intensify Hemingways most buried anxieties. His remarriage,
which he did not quite understand, created a keen sense of guilt in him along
with the recognition that he contained compulsive forces he was powerless to
restrain. Marriage, moreover, could be destructive not only because it had resulted in pain and divorce in his own case; as a child he had seen its effects in
the secret contests of will between his parents. Paulines dangerous, agonized
parturition seemed to confirm his feeling that death as readily as life was the
consequence of sexuality. He may well have felt what he had imagined the Indian father to feel before cutting his throat in Indian Camp. That early story
suggests that Hemingway had always seen something terrifying in the birth
process. Now he incorporated a birth process fatal to both fictional mother
and child in the conclusion of his novel.
His fathers suicide must have awakened further all his most inadmissible emotions, above all his feelings of hostility and guilt toward his parents.
Readers of Carlos Bakers biography do not need a review of Hemingways
childhood and youth with its history of rebellions and chastisements. The
spirited boy, adoring and striving to emulate his father, also incurred this
fathers disciplinarian severity, and young Ernests resentment of his punishment was so intense that he would sometimes, when he was about eighteen,
sit hidden in the doorway of a shed behind the house drawing a bead on his
fathers head with a gun while the doctor worked in his vegetable garden. Yet
it was this same father who had taught him to shoot, initiated him in the
craft and passion of killing animals. His feelings toward his mother, whose
musical-artistic inclinations might be thought to be the source of his own impulses toward the life of art, would, in the end, prove more bitterly hostile. As
he grew to manhood he felt, it would seem, more betrayed by her attempts to
control his behavior, especially after the war had proved him a man and even
a hero. There is the well-known incident of youthful high-jinks in the woods,
shortly after his twenty-first birthday, which resulted in his expulsion from
the Hemingways summer cottage at Walloon Lake. But more hurtful must
have been his parents moralistic censure of his writing. First In Our Time and
then The Sun Also Rises received their uncomprehending disapproval, against
which he politely pleaded.
Beneath the politeness there was sometimes a threat. After receiving
her criticism of his first novel Hemingway wrote his mother with only halfconcealed scorn, I am sure that it [the novel] is not more unpleasant than the
real inner lives of some of our best Oak Park families. You must remember
that in such a book all the worst of the peoples lives is displayed while at
home there is a very lovely side for the public and the sort of which I have

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had some experience of observing behind closed doors. Behind what doors
but those closed upon the conflicts he had known between his parents themselves? Hemingway was prone to hint for years that he might write an Oak
Park novel that would tell all: I had a wonderful novel to write about Oak
Park, he said in 1952, and would never do it because I did not want to hurt
living people. After his fathers death in 1928 he wrote his mother offering her some advice about how to handle his uncle George, whom he held
responsible for his fathers money worries, and he also added menacingly, I
have never written a novel about the [Hemingway] family because I have
never wanted to hurt anyones feelings but with the death of the ones I love
a period has been put to a great part of it and I may have to undertake it.
It is a curious statement, with its slip into the plural ones when among his
near relatives only his father had died. And was not his mother to be counted
among the ones I love? There seems to be an unclear implication that she as
much as his unclewhom he had always dislikedmight be exposed by his
writing. The Oak Park novel was never written. Yet if he rejected the temptation to write about his family lifeexcept in the hints given in such a story
as The Doctor and the Doctors Wifehe did not stop writing works that
might convey his insight into the unpleasant and defy his mothers moralistic hypocrisy. And the covertly autobiographic impulse persisted.
From the time of his fathers suicide, he must have felt himself to be
just such an orphan, though with a living parent, as Catherine and Frederic describe themselves. My father is the only one I cared about, he wrote
Maxwell Perkins after the doctors suicide. He then may already have believed
what he later stated to Charles Scribner, that his mother had destroyed her
husband, and his bitter sense of having been unloved by her fused with his
identification with his father: I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced
my father to suicide. But such liberations from filial love are never quite
complete. Underneath must have been the longing for approval, for a lost
infantile security. Hemingways own sexual history, that ultimate personal
expression, may have taken some shape from the mixture of need and anger
which probably composed his emotions toward his mother. The need to reject
as well as the need to be wanted again may explain the course of his love life,
with its four marriages and, as his life advanced, its rather greater propensity
of promiscuity. Promiscuity, of course, may also be based on the fear that one
cannot feel at all. Beneath the intensely expressive, even violent personality
of the visible Hemingway there may have been a self that was haunted by the
demon of boredom. Apathy, which might seem the least likely affliction of
this articulate and active man, may have been what he feared most, knowing
his own inner indifference. If so, then A Farewell to Arms does have a special
relation to the mind of the maker, is autobiographic in a metaphoric way.

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107

Some confirmation of this view may be gained by study of Hemingways

text as the result of revision and excision in accordance with his well-known
iceberg theory. In looking for the submerged element that supports a style
so economic, so dependent upon implication rather than explication, one is
prompted to consider the nature of what has been pruned away. Obviously,
the Hemingway aesthetic promotes the elimination of the merely redundant,
the detail that adds nothing, the explanation that can be supplied by the readers own surmise, the additional episode which may thicken the reality of the
story but also complicates its meaning too much. Some of this discard may
well supply autobiographic clues to the intentional process by which the work
was molded. Sometimes, one suspects, the rejected matter comes out of the
too-exact transcript of memory.
Even before the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms had been studied, it
was obvious that Hemingway might have planned his novel at some earlier
stage to include other elements besides those finally selected. Julian Smith has
argued that two stories written in 1926 just after the breakup of Hemingways
first marriage amplify the novel so precisely at certain points that they may
have been conceived of as part of it at one time. One of these is In Another
Country, whose title, with its reference to Marlowes Jew of Malta (Thou
hast committed / Fornicationbut that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead), Hemingway once considered using for the novel.
The second story linked with the novel is Now I Lay Me, entitled In Another CountryTwo in a late draft. Both short stories fulfill the title of the
collection in which they were printed in 1927, Men without Women, which
attaches them in an interesting way to the novel begun soon after, the novel
about the failure, in the end, of the sexual bridge over the gulf of solitude.
Both stories are really about marriage. In In Another Country the narrator, recovering from his wounds in a Milan hospital and receiving mechanical therapylike Hemingway and Frederic Henryis warned not to marry.
An Italian major who has just lost his wife tells him that a man cannot marry because if he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. Had Hemingway chosen to include the story as an episode
in A Farewell to Arms it might have served to predict Catherines death as
well as the conclusion that nothing, not even love, abides. In Now I Lay Me
the hero has been wounded in the particular fashion and with the particular
sensations Hemingway remembered from his own experience and attributed
to Frederic. He does not sleep wellbecause of the sound of the silkworms
and because he is afraid of dyingand passes restless nights thinking about
two kinds of boyhood experience: trout fishing and the quarrels between his
parents, with his mothers hen-pecking of his father. He is advised by his orderly to marry but does not, and does not intend to, unlike the narrator of the
companion story, who tells the major that he hopes to be married.

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There are any number of ways in which both stories can be related to
Hemingways personal experience, but it is clear that together they suggest
a fear associated with marriageeither one will somehow kill it oneself, as
he had done with his own first marriage, or it will kill you, or at least emasculate you, as his mother had emasculated his father. Despite the seemingly
positive assurance of the orderly in the second story that marriage will fix
everything, the effect of both tales is to suggest that death and destruction
arrive in the end. Love cannot heal the Hemingway hero who longs to return
to some presexual condition in the untainted woods of boyhood.
The connection of the two stories with the novel written so soon after
them is a matter of conjecture, but Hemingways manuscript drafts of A Farewell to Arms may justifiably be searched for evidence of his compositional intentions and his autobiographic sources. The draft indicates that Hemingway
had, for example, included a much more detailed version of the description of
wounding already used in Now I Lay Me and also a more detailed and more
emotional description of Frederics sensations on waking up in the hospital in
Milan.The final version screens out autobiographic irrelevance, for Frederic,
in the draft, makes on Hemingways behalf one of those representative comments that show him struggling against the flood of memory: If you try and
put in everything you would never get a single day done and then the one
who made it might not feel it. In the end the writer made these occasions
consistent with the rest of the novel as a representation of the state of mind
that is the grounding of his heros being. In the first three books, as Reynolds
has observed, the revisions nearly efface Frederic as a personality. He becomes
an almost completely apathetic sufferer. Though self-expression is allowed to
emerge in the love affair, it does not really make for reversal of this condition,
for in the place of the grand afflatus of love, the language of amorous avowal
that these lovers speak is self-diminishing.
A complex revision of a crucial passage is the alteration of the conversation between Frederic and the priest in chapter 11. In the manuscript draft
Frederic lists some of the things he loves, and adds at the end, I found I loved
god too, a little. I did not love anything too much. In the revision there is no
such list or remark, but there is, instead, the priests statement: When you
love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
Hemingway may be thought to have promoted by this addition the hope of
moral growth in his hero, who then asks, in the printed text, How about loving a woman? If I really loved some woman would it be like that? He cannot
answer his own question nor does the priest answer it, and though, much
later, Count Greffi calls love a religious feeling, Frederic, still dubious, can
respond only, You think so? Can we analogize the love of God and Frederics love of Catherine, in fact? Does human love acquire the highest possible
meaning for him? Not really. He cannot be said to attain the priests ideal of

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service and sacrifice. Nor does the formula apply to Catherine herself. Her
death is not redemptive, is not a true Imitation of Christ. It is not voluntarily
offered and does not save Frederic from anything or give him faith. Only
irony attends the sequel in which the surrender of self seems the consequence
of weakness rather than the bounty of strong love. The revision removes the
small assertion of faith that Frederic makes, I found I loved god too, a little,
and when the priest declares, You should love Him, the answer is simply, I
dont love much, or, as the draft has it, I did not love anything very much,
which seems a statement of affective deficiency in general, a general inability
to donate emotion.
Frederics estrangement from feeling is not the consequence of any particular wounding or of war disgust, or of any experience of adulthood, but of
a deeply founded sense of loss. A passage Hemingway took out of the novel
gives confirmation. It begins with the opening sentence of chapter 40, We
had a fine life, followed in the finished novel by a brief description of the way
the couple spent their days during the last of their winter stay in the Swiss
mountains. Hemingway decided not to use the long passage that originally
followed this opening sentence in which Frederic reflects, anticipating the
tragic conclusion, wisdom and happiness do not go together, and declares
his reductive certitude: The only thing I know is that if you love anything
enough they take it away from you. In this discarded passage, as in the rejected ending of the novel, Hemingway felt the need to refer once again to Rinaldi and the priest, those seemingly forgotten mentors of contrary wisdom,
and it is plain that Frederic cannot accept the latters faith, though he says, I
see the wisdom of the priest in our mess who has always loved God and so
is happy and I am sure that nothing will ever take God away from him. But
how much is wisdom and how much is luck to be born that way? And what if
you are not built that way? Earlier in the novel Gino is described as a patriot
because he is born that way and Rinaldi is a skeptic for the same reason. But
here, in the excised passage, Frederic speaks of himself: But what if you were
born loving nothing and the warm milk of your mothers breast was never
heaven and the first thing you loved was the side of a hill and the last thing
was a woman and they took her away and you did not want another but only
to have her; and she was gone, then you are not so well placed. For Hemingway, too, cannot it have been true that the warm milk of [his] mothers breast
was never heaven? Is this the underwater knowledge of self which supports
the poignancy of what remains in the final text of the novel?
Hemingways difficulties with the ending can now be seen to have been
caused by something besides his desire to be true to lifes inconclusiveness.
His heros emotional or philosophic nada threatened the very process of making sense, achieving illumination. Hemingway decided to eschew any hint
of apocalypse, rejecting even Fitzgeralds suggestion that he place at the end

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the passage in which Frederic describes how all are finished off impartially,
though the good, the gentle, and the brave go firstas dark a revelation as
one could imagine, but still a revelation of sorts. What would do best, he realized, would be simply the heros numb survival without insight, his notation
without catharsis.

E rik N akjavani

Hemingway on War and Peace

You had read on and studied the art of war ever since you were a boy and your
grandfather had started you on the American Civil War.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (335)

Prologue
e know that Ernest Hemingway considered the Prussian warriorphilosopher General Karl von Clausewitz the old Einstein of battles
(By-Line 291). From Hemingways perspective Clausewitz, the author of
On War (1832), a treatise on the theoretics and pragmatics of war, was the
most intelligent writer on the metaphysics of war that ever lived (Men at
War xiv). That is high praise, couched in simple, confident, and knowledgeable language. What we do not know is the basis of Hemingways
superlative comparison and his judgment. In his personal library at his
home La Finca Viga in San Francisco de Paula near Havana, Cuba, the
wide array of books on the American Civil War, military history strategy,
and war narratives in several languages attests to his own considerable
intellectual and theoretical investment in the subject.1 An examination,
subsequent analysis, and critical assessment of Hemingways own contribution to the 20th-century metaphysics of war constitute my intention in
this essay. I shall mainly concentrate on Hemingways reflections on war as
North Dakota Quarterly, Volume 68, Numbers 23 (Spring-Summer 2001): pp. 245275.
Copyright 2001 North Dakota Quarterly.

111

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we find them in his preface to A Farewell to Arms (1949) and in introductions to Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (1942) and Treasury
for the Free World (1946). It is our common knowledge that Hemingway
gave the subject of war a privileged metaphorical position in the general
thematics of his fiction. My concentration on these three prefaces would
make it possible to deal with his own articulation and imbrication of metaphysical, psychological, and literary aspects of war, on the one hand, and
the ethics of national and individual behavior in wartime, on the other.
It leaves out his fictional concerns with such matters, which have already
been extensively dealt with in Hemingway scholarship.
I. On the Inevitability and the Criminality of War
No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war.
Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (210)
We know war is bad. Yet sometimes it is necessary to fight. But still war
is bad and any man who says it is not is a liar.
Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters (480)

Hemingways 1949 preface to the illustrated edition of A Farewell to Arms

(1929) gives him the opportunity to express his views on the topic of war
as a persistent dimension of the human condition. The title of this book
is A Farewell to Arms he writes, and except for three years there has been
war of some kind almost ever since it has been written (x). Considering
the enormity of the subject, Hemingways tone is relatively disillusioned,
reticent, and almost detached, without heat or hope, but authoritative.
He makes a simple statement that may be boiled down to stating that the
lived history of our time is experiential proof of the inevitability of war.
He only intimates that the title refers to his World War I (19141918)
novel, a war of unprecedented mechanized violence and brutality, which
was naively hailed by some as the war to end all wars. The intervening
years, before and after the publication of A Farewell to Arms, were to
belie that claim. Wars and other conf licts betrayed even the most modest measure of hope the title in one of its multiple signification might
have impliedboth on the planes of the individual and the particular
and the national and the universal. The three years of uneasy peace to
which Hemingway refers could have only been the gift of the total European war weariness and exhaustion, not at all a reassuring reason for the
absence of war. After this minimal and highly compressed but essential
account of two decades of European history, he then gently makes fun
of the critics who irked him by regarding his interest in war as obsessive,

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113

even pathological. Some people used to say, he chides, why is the man
so preoccupied and obsessed with war, and now, since 1933 perhaps it is
clear why a writer should be interested in the constant bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war (x).
Thus, writing in 1949, for Hemingway nearly the whole first half of
the 20th century stands accused of the murderous, slovenly crime of war,
going all the way back to the European 19081914 arms race, which he
characteristically leaves out. What he does include is the mere mention of
the virulent form of the constant bullying and the quasi-mystical glorification of murderous impulses in the 1933 rise of Nazi ideology. It is an
ideology that regards violence as sacred within the putative prerogatives
of the Aryan master race. Hemingway might have added other bloody
events he knew so much about, mainly the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia, as an armed struggle for a classless society that was to sweep away
what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, decried
as All fixed and fast-frozen [human] relations, with their train of ancient
and venerable prejudices and opinions (12); the surge of Italian Fascism
(1922) as the resurgence of the Roman Empire; and the Spanish Civil
War (19361939). The bipolarity of these two ideologies, Communism
and Fascism, found their common ground in totalitarian attitudes, but the
Nazi and Fascist ideologies appeared more inclined to acclaim unbound
violence as a value in itself. Violence appeared to them to yield a panacea
to individual and national powerlessness. In 1935, in Notes on the Next
War, Hemingway warns:
In a modern war there is no Victory. The allies won the war
but the regiments that marched in triumph were not the men
who fought the war. The men who fought the war were dead.
More than seven million of them were dead and it is the murder
of over seven million more that an ex-corporal in the German
army [Hitler] and an ex-aviator and former morphine addict
[Mussolini] drunk with personal and military ambition and
fogged in a blood-stained murk of misty patriotism look forward
hysterically to today. (By-Line 211)

Hemingways interest as a writer in all the blood-lust and bloodletting

in the 20th century is also augmented by the omnipresence of their analogues
throughout human history. He reminds us that Europe has always fought,
the intervals of peace are only Armistices (By-Line 212). For him, the historical background is a melancholy reminder of our foreground, a gloomy
story elaborately and intricately foretold. It is the continual preparation for
and perpetual occurrence of war that force Hemingway to consider war as a

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subject of primary interest for a writer. Persuaded that the foretold are at least
forewarned, he sounds an alarm. War, as an atavistic concern, fascinates him
and compels him to reflect. He would have agreed with the Chinese warriorphilosopher Sun Tzu who holds that Military action is . . . the ground of
death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is important to examine it (x).
However, I find no reason to suggest that war and its metaphors and
metonymies heard as echoes in Hemingways writing are in any way an advocacy of war. It is tempting to establish a connection between intellectual, literary, and personal interests and advocacy in his case, but I believe it will prove
to be wading in the shallows and ultimately a spurious undertaking. It will
be so regardless of the occasions for bravery and nobility, which Hemingway
greatly admired, that war provides for men. There is too much evidence to the
contrary. In his introduction to Treasury for the Free World, he is unmistakably
direct about the criminality of war:
An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good
in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to
aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great countercrime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how
justified, is not a crime. (xv)

In Wings over Africa, he instructs us that war has the essence of all of
these [tyranny, injustice, murder, brutality, and the corruption of the soul]
blended together and is strengthened by its various parts until it is stronger
than any of the evils it is composed of can ever be (By-Line 234). Thus he
does not condone war as admissible or excusableeven though often war
may be defensive, unavoidable, and. inevitable. For him, as we have just seen,
war always conjugates all manifestations of evil in such a way as to make
them more effective in their combined demonic violence.
War is always wrong, Karl Jaspers categorically proclaimsplain
and simple (115). No casuistry of just war for Jaspers. It would seem to
me Hemingway would have no quarrel with such a straightforward ethical statement. Yet, from a writers point of view, he considers war to be a
significant experience. The experience of war is consequential to him even
if a writer peripherally participates in it, as Hemingway did by serving with
the Red Cross on the Italian front where he was gravely wounded on July 8,
1918. Accordingly, his understanding of waras being at once unavoidable
and unacceptable, even when it places itself under the sign of counter-violencedeepens and becomes exceedingly nuanced. His fictional references
to matters of war testify to the scope and complexity of his comprehension
of the subject, even though his own direct war experience was limited. As an

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115

exigent life-and-death experiencea veritable extremis or limit-situation,

as Jasper calls itwar is no doubt for many an unsurpassable and often
epiphanic experience.
I would say that the dualities of Hemingways attitude toward war and
the conduct of men at war simultaneously bear marks of the antithetical
Freudian and the early Christian thinking on the subject. I will go so far as to
suggest that the dualities of his thought on war signal an effort to reconcile
these two seemingly irreconcilable modes of thought: Christian dogmatics
and Freudian psychoanalysis. The former commands: Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself and Love thine enemieswhich, combined, speak
the essence of the mysteries of the concepts of Christian love and charity.
Freudian psychoanalysis considers the neighbor as the stranger, the Other,
and therefore as either a real or potential enemy. This dialectical shift from
the thesis of Christian love to its Freudian antithesis of skepticism seems so
knotty as to make a reconciliation between the two and a potential synthesis
appear impossible. However, is this synthesis entirely outside the realm of at
least conceptual possibility? The answer does not fall easily within our grasp.
Thus it requires closer examination, analysis, and interpretation of the concepts of the Other, both as an object of our love and of our hostility or hatred,
before we can conceive of a synthesis.
II. On the Metaphysics and Psychology of War and Peace
Homo homini lupus. [Man is a wolf to man.] Who, in the face of all
his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this
assertion?
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (58)

Iris Murdoch pointedly remarks that The paradox of our situation is that
we must have theories about human nature, no theory explains everything,
yet it is just the desire to explain everything that is the spur of theory (190).
In relation to the concepts of war and peace, Hemingway too, feels the tug
and pull of this desirealbeit that for him, as a novelist, the spur of theory
is dominated by the density of the particular and the experiential. These
characteristic polarities of his thought, his general belief in the inevitability
of war, and his reluctant acceptance of it as an undeniable reality puts him
in the proximity if not indeed within the parameters of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. To probe somewhat deeper into Hemingways thought on war
and to situate it within the larger context of 20th-century thought I find it
helpful to review briefly its shared concerns with Sigmund Freuds similar
psychoanalytic interests.

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In 1909, Freud is already aware that the aggressive instinct needs to be

included in his general theory of instincts. By 1930, he accords it a significant
conceptual place as the death instinct in Civilization and Its Discontents. We
find him to be initially hesitant to provide a thorough formulation of what he
terms aggressive instinct. While giving it a prominent place in animal biology, he is inclined at this time to attenuate its biological and therefore prelinguistic role in the human psyche. For to include it in the human constitution
appears sacrilegious; it contradicts too many religious presumptions and social
conventions (Anxiety 129). Since he was no stranger to defiance of received
notions, his hesitation may have even had a more poignant source than the
religious and social disapprobation: Freud was a humanist. Exposed as we have
been to the thoroughgoing structuralism of the 20th century, we understand
his sensitivity, ambivalence, and reserve about this subject, which is uncharacteristic of him and his courageous stance in matters clinical, theoretical, and
speculative. In 1909, in the Little Hans case history Analysis of a Phobia
in a Five-Year-Old Boy, Freud elaborates further on his reluctance: I cannot
bring myself to assume the existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside
of the familiar instinct of self-preservation and sex, and on an equal footing
with them (143). Nevertheless, during and after World War I, his reticence
gradually is attenuated and then disappears altogether. By 1930, with the rise
of German Nazism looming over the horizon, he is ready to proclaim:
Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from
biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct
to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units,
there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve
those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic
state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death.
(Civilization 6566)

For Freud, this is a decisive moment when historical reality affirms theoretical findings. He was no doubt witnessing, reflecting on, and being
influenced by powerful German ideological, political, social, and cultural
upheavals in the making. Coincidentally, Hemingway too discerned these
disturbing convulsions in Germany, worrying that
those [in Germany] who had never accepted a military defeat hated
those who had and started to do away with the ablest of them
by the vilest program of assassination the world has ever known.
They started, immediately after the war, by killing Karl Liebknecht
[a founder of the German Social Democratic party] and Rosa
Luxemburg [economist and revolutionary], and they killed on,

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steadily eliminating revolutionary and liberal alike by an unvarying

process of intelligent assassination. (By-Line 182)

Intelligent assassination efficiently produces dead bodies; but, above all,

what it kills so well and so often is intelligence itself. Completely disillusioned, Freud, too, now advances the idea that all human relations are based
on irremediable aggression that, if frustrated, turns into uncontrolled and
uncontrollable violent explosions. Therefore, peaceful coexistence and cooperation will forever elude civilized human beings who aspire to it.
Freud theoretically defies and finally negates the two Christian commandments, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself and Love thine enemies on experiential, personal, collective, and historical bases. For Freud,
my neighbor is in general unworthy of my love and. has more claim to my
hostility and even my hatred. This is so because my neighbor seems not to
have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration (Civilization 57). As, such, my neighbor shall always be a stranger to
me and I to him. Here the logic of aggression reigns supreme, and, ultimately,
the reason of the strongest proves to be the best. Freud, like Hemingway,
disillusioned by increasing Nazi and Fascist strength, finds not superior intelligence but superior force to have been the final arbiter of all matters in human history. Within this vicious circle of alterity and alienation, the I-thou
relationship in caritas is then entirely replaced by the hostile I-it encounter
in which I deny the subjective autonomy of my neighbor and reduce him to
an object of my aggression.
Freud seems to be generally answering Schopenhauers old philosophical question: Is man not the beast of prey which will pounce upon a weaker
neighbor as soon as he notices his existence? And is this fact not confirmed
everyday in ordinary life? Freuds answer is an unsparing, Yes! Schopenhauer
further elaborates that No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this that constitutes the diabolical nature
which is worse than the merely bestial (Essays 139). In Schopenhauers philosophy Christian love (caritas) is perverted into Schadenfreude, the sadistic
pleasure in someones discomfiture or misfortune. Schadenfreude reveals itself
in life as the malevolent laughter of Hell (Essays 140). Nietzsche later sadly
claimed that The whole life of the Christian is at last exactly the life from
which Christ preached deliverance (Will to Power 125).
Hemingway, too, knew much about Schadenfreude as the drunkards behavior in the massacre of Fascists in For Whom the Bell Tolls (99129) makes
abundantly clear. His voice on these matters as a whole is in remarkable
harmony with the chorus of European disillusionment and disenchantment
with the human condition. In the essay On the Blue River, Hemingway
wryly observes, Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and

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those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really
care for anything else thereafter (By-Line 236). The certainty of the thrill
of one man hunting another provides a striking psychological and ethical
admission. It indicates a far-reaching discovery for Hemingway and a fearsome and consequential revelation for the reader. To the extent that the
hunting of one man by another ushers us into an endless sadomasochistic
dialectic, it clearly includes a psychical space in which the hunter and the
hunted can easily metamorphose into one another. Hemingways view of
human aggressive instinct coincides with the more general psychoanalytic
and philosophical theories of Freud and his philosopher predecessors Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Human aggression merely gets stated differently
by Hemingway in his own direct style of thinking and writing drawn from
lived experience and imagination.
In this context, one may consider Hemingways so-called obsession
with war not as a symptom of his neurosis but, more accurately, as a concern
with a fundamental dimension of lived history and, by extension, of all human history. He wants us to be aware that All of history is of one piece and
it is ourselves . . . (Men at War xxiii). Thus if there be a neurosis, its origin
must be primarily sought not in Hemingway but, above all, in the lived human history itself. Hemingways beloved predecessors in art and literature
such as Stendhal, Tolstoy, Goya, and Stephen Crane faced the same historical
phenomenon: history as the long sad narratives of the collective neurosis of
aggression and the psychosis of war.
III. On the Conduct of War and Just Peace
Regardless of how this war [WW II] was brought on . . . there is only
one thing now to do. We must win it. We must win it at all costs and
as soon as possible.
Ernest Hemingway, Men at War (xi)

Hemingway appears to have considered the concept of jus ad bellum or just

war as no more than a sophistical theory at best and a mendacious one at
worst. It survives to our day as the Catholic Churchs desire to reconcile war
and Christs commandment, Love thine enemies, under certain conditions
or circumstances (Council of Arles 314). It was a modality of realpolitik
which later became a part of the Churchs doctrine. We have already seen
that Hemingway unreservedly believes war to be criminal in all its various
manifestations. He finds no conditions or circumstances in which war could
be sanctioned as good or legitimized as just as, say, Gratian and Saint
Augustine did. Correlatively, for him, the only mode of jus in bello or just
conduct in war is to win it quickly by any means possible, regardless of who

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or what has initially caused it. He develops a realistic argument to support

his negation of jus in bello. In his introduction to the anthology of war narratives, Men at War, he tells us that
The editor of this anthology, who took part and was wounded
in the last war to end war [WW I], hates war and hates all the
politicians whose mismanagement, gullibility, cupidity, selfishness
and ambition brought on this present war [WW II] and made it
inevitable. But once we have a war there is only one thing to do.
It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever
happen in a war. (xi, my emphasis)

For me, this paragraph makes intelligible the crux of Hemingways

thought on the conduct of war: war is irrecusably evil, always and everywhere, but worse is yet the evil of defeat. Tactically, he advises, when the
moment arrives, whether it is in a barroom fight or in a war, the thing to
do is to hit your opponent the first punch and hit him as hard as possible
(Men at War xxi). This statement has a Machiavellian cast to it; and yet it
simply makes its way beyond expediency to another sphere of significant
considerations. I discern in it Hemingways absolute dread of defeat, which
borders on a Hegelian master-slave dialectic. Winning a war bestows the
rights of the master on the winner and ushers in a period of slavery for the
loser. For Hemingway, nothing less than the essence of our humanity, that
is, our freedom is at stake in losing a war. The horrific upshot of losing a war
makes itself manifest in the unavoidable loss of freedom and the consequent
enslavement suffered by an individual, group, tribe, race, or nation. That is
precisely why Hemingway can write an unthinkable sentence such as: The
answer to the Nazi claim that Germans area superior race and other races
shall be slaves is to say, and mean it, We will take your race and wipe it out
(Men at War xxix). And mean it? The ferocity of the sentence derives from
the equally unimaginable horror of slavery for Hemingway. Thus he puts
forward a subcategory of the Hegelian idea of the fight to the death, which
naturally issues from the master-slave conflict, its consequent dialectic, and
acquires the dimension of an imperative. Hemingway can only respond to
the possibility of defeat with fury and utter contempt. A human being is always better dead than enslaved. As a consequence, he simply insists that We
must win it [this war] (Men at War xi), which becomes for him incantatory
in its necessity, intensity, and repetition.
After all is said, it is still in the name of freedom, or the negation of
slavery as a mode of human existence in its totality, that he adds: We must
win it never forgetting what we are fighting for, in order that while we are
fighting Fascism we do not slip into the ideas and ideals of Fascism (Men at

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War xii). For Fascism absolute power denies, violates, obliterates, and eventually even surpasses freedom as a constituent of the human condition. I would
suggest that one may interpret Hemingways startling proposal to wipe out
the German race as We will take your Nazi ideology and we will wipe it out.
We mean this. In the same mode of thinking, admitting that Germans are
practical professionals in war, he counsels:
We can learn all their lessons without being Fascists if we keep our
minds open. All we need is common sense, a quality which is often
conspicuously lacking in generalship but which our own Civil War
produced the great masters of. We can beat the Germans without
becoming Fascists. We can fight a total war without becoming
totalitarians if we do not stand on our mistakes and try to cover
them. . . . (Men at War xiii)

This passage makes sufficiently evident the radical complexity of Hemingways metaphysics of war, which reformulates the concept of jus ad bellum by
removing from war the possibility of enslaving the defeated. Hemingways
reference to the American Civil War in the passage becomes noteworthy
in this new reformulation. In his 1946 introduction to Treasury for the Free
World, he refers to peacetime as a more difficult time when it is a mans duty
to understand his world rather than simply fight for it (xiii). He considers
the understanding of ones world to be hard work [that] will involve reading
much that is unpleasant to accept. But it is one of mans first duties now
(xiii). And, among other things, this unpleasant reading will make it clear
to us that
We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that
it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless
enemies that it was necessary to destroy. . . . For the moment we
are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we
do not become the most hated. (Treasury xiii)

Again, Hemingway turns the Fascist ideology upside down by privileging freedom over absolute power. In On the American Dead in Spain,
he writes:
The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with
weight of metal brought from other countries. They may advance
aided by traitors and by cowards. They may destroy cities and
villages and try to hold people in slavery. But you cannot hold any
people in slavery. (37, my emphasis)

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What enslaving power seeks is temporary because freedom endures. Just

as the earth can never die, neither those who have been free return to slavery (American Dead 37). For Hemingway, Fascism is a hating, hateful,
and hated ideology, in the fullest sense of those adjectives, and doomed to
failure everywhere. It is also the most pernicious because it is as contagious
as a plague disguised as privilege. So we, too, can become hated to the
extent that we are vulnerable to its contagion, which can easily contaminate
and corrupt a super-power. He warns that it would be easy for us, if we
do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges,
and duties of all other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the
same danger to the world that Fascism did (Treasury xiiixiv). A terrible
and terrifying possibility. He seems to agree with the ancient Taoist Chinese
warrior Sun Tzu that it is best not to celebrate victory, that Those who
celebrate victory are bloodthirsty, and the bloodthirsty cannot have their
way with the world (x). Hemingway is intensely passionate about making
the conditions for a genuinely human world free from oppression a reality.
He strongly admonishes that
This is no time for any nation to have any trace of the mentality
of the bully. It is no time for any nation to become hated. It is no
time for any nation to even swagger. Certainly it is no time for
any nation to jostle. It is no time for any nation to be anything but
just. (Treasury xiv)

However, the just peace he proposes is as hard to attain as fighting a war

and winning it, perhaps even more so in a particular sense. One may say
that just peace is the Tao of overcoming without fightingwhich, above
all, affirms a certain existential freedom, of refusing to subject significant
human activities to determinism of any kind, be it biological, instinctual,
economic, or otherwise. Just peace is, then, a matter of profundities of a
specific kind of education and re-education. From a psychoanalytic perspective, it is tantamount to the constructive sublimation of the destructive
instinct. Nevertheless, it must be clearly taken into account that such a sublimation, as education or re-education, is a multidimensional and difficult
process. It demands that creative forces substitute freely chosen sublimates
for the objects of the destructive instinct with which they appear to be
inextricably interwoven. The determinism of the concept of destructive
instinct opposes or modifies the fulfillment of freedoms call. Just the same,
Hemingway insists upon this fulfillment. Like Platos charioteer, Phaedrus,
he intends to control two horses of great powerone dark and implacable
and the other more placable and pliantby guiding them wisely. Let us
read him:

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We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious;
nor hypocritical; nor vengeful nor stupid. Let us make our enemies
incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, and let
us learn to live in peace and justice with all the countries and all
peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate.
But first we must educate ourselves. (Treasury xv)

At the time (1946), this re-education was also a call to confront any victorious nations permanent dominion over the conquered nations.
In this new world all of the partners will have to relinquish. It will
be as necessary to relinquish as it was necessary to fight. No nation
who holds land or dominion over people where it has no just right
to it can continue to do so if there is to be enduring peace. . . .
(Treasury xiv)

He further warns, There will be no lasting peace, nor any possibility of a

just peace, until all lands where the people are ruled, exploited, and governed by any government whatsoever against their consent are given their
freedom (Men at War xxix). For Hemingway, among others, added to this
complex of reasons is the emergence of the immense problematics of the
atomic bomb:
We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our
world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue,
intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how
they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a
property of a part of the world. We must study them more carefully
than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a
moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee a
just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly
you become eligible for being wiped out yourself. (Treasury xiv)

A nagging question still persists: are we educable or re-educable in this

exigent and drastic way that Hemingway suggests? Can weeither as
individuals, groups, or nationsovercome sanctimoniousness, hypocrisy,
vengefulness, incomprehension, even just plain stupidity? Were we capable
of such rational transcendence of instinctual forces, were we able to challenge the sovereignties of major or minor differences (Freud, Civilization
61) and their attendant narcissism, were we strong enough to overcome the
notion that whoever is wholly or partially not me deserves my transgression
and violence, we would have never needed to resort to violence and war as a

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means of settling our problems in the first place. In any case, Hemingway
the humanist did cherish such a hope on a good sunny day in Cuba, as did
Bertrand Russell in his essay Has Man a Future? Perhaps he believed so
in contradistinction to his own experiential knowledgethinking against
himself, as it were. Or he may have considered the refusal not to have hope
a sin, regardless of the paralyzing evidence to the contrary at the time.
And why not? After all, faith and hope, anticipating the nascent mysterys
predawn hour, bypass the circuits of conceptual and often experiential
knowledge. Even Nietzsches Zarathustra advises: Let work be a struggle,
your peace a victory. . . . Let your love for life be your highest hope. And
let your highest hope be the highest thought of life (Thus Spoke 4950). It
may have indeed been so with Hemingway. In my view, work as struggle
against impossible odds is constantly infused with intensities of love and life
in the entirety of Hemingways writing. As an observer (and occasionally as
a peripheral participant) in different capacities in various wars and as a student of war he might have arrived at the contrary conclusion. But his hope
for victory and just peace does highlight a certain hard-earned, admirable
optimism in him.
One may summarily say, as far as Hemingway is concerned, once we are
at war we have no other alternative but to win at any price. But once we have
won a war and have peace, we cannot be anything but just. If Hemingway
refuses to accept the conceptual and practical speciousness of just war, he
offers us a different notion as replacement: just peace. I consider it as his contribution to the Kantian philosophical ideal of perpetual peace. His optimism
merits serious consideration, equally serious experiential and psychoanalytic
arguments against it notwithstanding. I would lay it down then this way: with
the notion of just peace Hemingway enters, at least provisionally, a zone of
pure hope and freedom.
IV. On Men at War
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones
country [Horace]. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting
in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (209)
My brothers in war! I love you with all my heart; I am and was of your
sort. And I am also your best enemy. Then let me tell you the truth!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (48)

As we have already seen, there exists a sufficient body of evidence in

Hemingways meditations on war to make a simple, straightforward

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statement: Hemingway hated war. His hatred of war, however, makes a

highly intricate and multi-faceted mosaic of concerns. His hatred of war
should be particularly extended to the judgment he brings to men at war
and those he primarily holds responsible for instigating war for ambition,
venality, and sheer love of brutality. Let us begin with the judgment he
renders on war profiteers. In Wings over Africa, he expresses the conviction that The only people who ever loved war for long were profiteers,
generals, staff officers, and whores. They all had the best and finest time
of their lives and most of them made the most money they had ever made
(By-Line 234). One may assume that for him all manner of profiteering
from war is a kind of whoring. It is not too difficult, however, to imagine
the real whore was the most honorable, the most honest in her intention,
the least harmful to others, and the least offensive to Hemingway in his
roster of the whoring profiteers and professional mercenaries. Elsewhere
he writes: I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and
who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited
representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it
(Farewell x). In mock-seriousness, he adds he would be very glad to be in
charge of this shooting, if legally delegated by those who will fight. . . .
In these reflections, he makes a clear distinction between anyone who in
any way stands to profit from the war and the combatants. It is the latter
whom he sees as being amongst the finest people that there are, or just say
people, although, the closer you are to where they are fighting, the finer
people you meet . . . (Farewell x). It is the courage and resourcefulness,
the toughness and resiliencein short, the nobility and heroism of the
ordinary soldier in the face of death that he so utterly admires. The soldier
becomes a veritable warrior in extremis, a man whose life will forever be
transformed by his martial experience if he survives and conducts himself
well and with grace. It is the human heart and the human mind in war
that he finds praiseworthy and instructive (Men at War xx). The baptism
of fire will either wholly engulf the warrior or shall earn him the mantle
of authenticity, in its Heideggerian sense and implications, as only the
warrior elite has always come to know and to incarnate. It is all a matter
of combatants facing death intelligently, bravely, even exuberantly in a war
not of their own making. When slain in battle, these warriors are heroes
that the Norse mythology assigns to Valhalla, the paradise of heroes. It is
exactly to such potential warriors that Hemingway addresses himselfif
not as a former brother-in-arms at least as a participant in war and then as
an older, wiser commentator. In a paragraph in Men at War, Hemingway
offers to the books potential World War II warrior-readers a lyrical narrative of being wounded in World War I:

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125

When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of

immortality. Other people get killed; not you. It can happen to
other people; but not to you. Then when you are badly wounded
the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen
to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my
nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured it out that
nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men
before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had
done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry
about it. (xiiixiv)

This is a multi-layered narrative of elegiac elegance and depth. The illusion

of immortality partakes of a deep-running narcissism, which, incidentally,
markedly influences Hemingways writing as a whole. It signals a regression
to The fantasy from childhood of a secret valley of no death, like beliefs in
the Elysian Fields, or joining our ancestors or the company of immortals, is
eloquent testimony to the strength and influence of our striving toward narcissism which eludes the real impairment or injury (Rocklin 216). The soldier
all too quickly wakes up from this dream of immortality and has to face the
verities of combat. What awaits him is the nightmarish reality of historys
killing fields and the warriors stoic acceptance of it and willing participation
in it. As William James has put it: Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army
in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious
person he may bring with him . . . (283). For both Hemingway and James,
war signifies a process of divestment of narcissism, whose virulent outbursts
our history has continually recorded and has mostly rationalized and glorified. It is the acceptance of war and its vicissitudes as an inextricable part of
human existence that eventually dissipates the quasi-hallucinatory narcissism
and gives birth to the true warrior within whose ranks Hemingway aspired
to inscribe his own name. The warrior loses the illusion of immortality to the
extent that his narcissistic fantasy of a precious and immortal self commences
to lose its grip on his psyche. From a Nietzschean vantage point, it is at this
very juncture that Hemingway appears as both brother and enemy to
would-be warriors he counsels. His kinship is with the disillusioned, mortal
warrior against the naive, narcissistic, immortal soldier. To the World War II
potential warrior-readers of Men at War, he points out:
This book will not tell you how to die. This book will tell you,
though, how all men from the earliest times we know have fought
and died. So when you have read it you will know that there are

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no worse things to be gone through than men have been through

before. (xi)

He speaks directly from experiential knowledge and his words carry a

considerable existential and psychological insight. There is a strange and
striking fraternity among warriors of all time who stoically endure the unendurable, which the act of reading can evoke and affirm. Hemingway speaks
from the depth of this fraternal feeling. Trusting these fraternal bonds and
understandings, he recommends as profoundly enlightening, helpful, and
healing the narratives of men at war bearing away the unspeakable violence,
from the earliest time in history to our own. He regrets that he was
very ignorant at nineteen and had read little and I remember
the sudden happiness and the feeling of having a permanent
protecting talisman when a young British officer [E. E. Chink
Dorman-Smith] I met when in the hospital first wrote out for me,
so I could remember them, these lines:
By my troth, I care not: a man can die but once; we owe God a death
. . . and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the
next [from Shakespeares Henry IV].
That is probably the best thing that is written in this book and,
with nothing else, a man can get along all right on that.

Hemingway regrets that there was no really good true war book during the
entire four years of the war [19141918] except in poetry (Men at War xiv).
A really good book might have revealed how in a war
worrying does no good . . . A good soldier does not worry. He
knows that nothing happens until it actually happens and you
live your life up until then. Danger only exists at the moment of
danger. To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such
things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is
bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished
from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the
functioning of the imagination. (Men at War xxvii)

Perhaps one can equate worrying in this passage with anxiety in its clinical, definitional sense; that is to say, as catastrophic anticipation of the deeply suppressed annihilative threat to the self that, with the help of a highly
sensitized imagination, is aroused from its slumber, exceeds itself and subsequently operates as an autonomous unconscious force within consciousness.
As such, it makes itself known as a psychic state beyond conscious control.

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Freud connects it with the castration complex. For Melanie Klein, it has its
origin in the ruthlessness of the death instinct and is thereby experienced as
an intimation of death itself. Both theories indicate a fantasy of aggression
that has risen to a way of being replete with intimations of non-being, an
ontological state and its antithesis, turning inward now rather than outward
in its multiplicity of forms. In yet another register, Jacques Lacan properly
categorizes it as aggression suicidaire narcissique (crits 187).
Along with psychoanalyst Rollo May, I would go a step further and
place Hemingways notion of a soldiers worrying or anxiety under the overall umbrella of existential experience of the threat of imminent non-being,
which is always a threat to the foundation, the center of my existence (50).
As such it is a specific ontological concern that differentiates it from mere
panic or fear:
Fear . . . is a threat to the periphery [of ones] existence; it can be
objectivated and the person can stand outside and look at it . . .
Fear can be studied as an affect among other affects, a reaction
among other reactions. But anxiety can only be understood as a
threat to Dasein [existence]. (May 51)

And for men at war, it is the temporal element of anxiety, as a break in

the continuity of everyday life, which Ludwig Binswanger recognizes and
designates as suddenness, that is most salient. In this context, Binswanger
tells us that It is this type of temporal orientation that permits the element
of suddenness to assume such enormous significance; because suddenness
is the time quality that explodes continuity, hacks it and chops it to pieces,
throws the earlier existence out of its course and exposes it to the Dreadful,
to the naked horror (204). War is preponderantly the realm of suddenness, that is, the unpredictable and therefore of the dreadful and the horrific. Unpredictability surging up from nowhere, so to speak, makes war at
once inordinately simple and terrifyingly complex. As a result, the difficulty
of the simple things in war and their attendant anxiety are their particular
temporal dimension, that is, suddenness and its consequent tearing apart of
the fabric of human life.
Clearly, Hemingway is experientially, emotionally, and intellectually
fully cognizant of the psychological ramifications of the triad of fear, catastrophic anticipation, and anxiety. His recommendation to the intelligent and
imaginative warrior is the willed and willing suspension of that highly prized
capacity: imagination. Now imagination is constituted by and is constitutive of a certain mode of psychic wholeness that comprises a lived space and
time. Let us call it an imaginal spatio-temporal continuum. It is within this
continuum that intelligence, sensitivity, sensibility, emotional empathy, con-

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nectedness, and psychical cohesiveness dwell. In short: imagination, perpetually unfolding within its own continuum as it does, is what properly renders
us human. The suspension of our imagination demands a restructuring of the
imaginal spatio-temporal continuuma task so exigent as to seem impossible without negating ones own lived or ego identity. But then the strength
to will the suspension of imagination is tantamount to preternatural bravery
of the warrior elite, which simultaneously enriches and impoverishes the warrior as a human being. Hemingways thinking here is not too far from Jamess,
who argues: Far better it is for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness.
If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the
opposite of a reasoning and thinking man (283). A reasoning and thinking
man is by definition an imaginative man as well. Such a man will find it considerably troublesome believing that Any act that helps my side win the war
is right and good, and any act that hinders it is wrong and bad (Gray 132).
Yet a true warrior needs to act spontaneously on that basis under extreme
circumstancesan operation that, as we have already seen, requires at least
a provisional shutting down of the imaginative processes. When the warrior
has acquired the ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination, he
may then discover that
To win a war you have to do things that are inconceivable in peace
and that are often hateful to those who do them. Afterwards
some people get used to them. Some get to like them. Every one
wants to do everything, no matter what, to get it [war] over with.
(Treasury xv)

As James puts it, the immediate aim of a soldiers life is . . . destruction

and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are
remote and non-military (8384). James and Hemingway appear then to be
establishing a new pragmatic vocabulary for reflection on the metaphysics of
war and the conduct of men at war. Hemingways military pedagogy intentionally remains mostly at the level of the experiential and the pragmatic. It
provides the basis for a theory of combat that one may refer to as conceiving
the inconceivable by suspending the imagination. It becomes a matter of accepting the fantasy of annihilation as a real possibility. A warrior, as a fighting man or Homo furens, still needs to manage to belong to the genus Homo
sapiens and not be degraded to something less than a man (Gray 2627).
Ultimately, great warriors are capable of fully reconciling themselves with
Dylan Thomas well known line: After the first death, there is no other (197).
Thomas poetic logic brings to mind the passage about dying in Shakespeares
Henry IVbearing witness at once to total rebellion and total stoicism, to

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oblivion and immortality. From this specific angle, a warriors profession

is not only le mtier triste but also, to a large extent, le mtier mystique
as well.
V. On the Metaphysics and Psychology of War and Writing
No one has more right to write of these actions that saved Madrid than
Gustav Regler. He fought in all of them.
Ernest Hemingway, preface to Gustav Reglers
The Great Crusade (vii)
War is the father of all good things [Heraclitus]. War is also the father
of good prose.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (145)

Hemingway considered war a significant experience for a writer. In Green

Hills of Africa, thinking of Tolstoy, he acknowledges what a great advantage
an experience of war was to a writer. Further magnifying the scope of this
advantage, he pronounces war as one of the major subjects and certainly
one of the hardest to write truly of. He resents that those writers who had
not seen it were always very jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant,
or abnormal, or a disease as a subject, really, it was just something quite
irreplaceable that they had missed (Green Hills 70). In a long passage in
Men at War, he pays homage to Stendhal as a writer who begins with this
irreplaceable experience and then invents a true and unforgettable account
from it:
The best account of actual human beings behaving during a
world shaking event is Stendhals picture of young Fabrizio at the
battle of Waterloo. That account is more like war and less like the
nonsense written about it than any other writing could possibly be.
Once you have read it you will have been at the battle of Waterloo
and nothing can take that experience away from you. You will
have to read Victor Hugos account of the same battle, which is
a fine, bold, majestic painting of the whole tragedy, to find out
what you saw there the as you rode with the boy [Fabrizio]; but
you will have actually seen the field of Waterloo already whether
you understood it or not. You will have seen a small piece of war as
closely and clearly with Stendhal as any man has ever written of it.
It is the classic account of a routed army and beside it all of Zolas
piled on detail in his Debacle is dead and unconvincing as a steel
engraving. Stendhal served with Napoleon and saw some of the

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greatest battles of the world. But all he ever wrote about war is the
one long passage from Le [sic] Chartreuse de Parme. . . . (xx)

Needless to say, what Hemingway admires in Stendhal is the latters having seen a war in serving with Napoleon, who taught him to write.
According to Hemingway, Napoleon was teaching everybody then;
but no one else learned (Green Hills 7). Stendhal learned because, as
Nietzsche has remarked, Stendhal may well have had more thoughtful eyes and ears than any other Frenchman of this century (Gay Science
149)a keen observation wonderfully put. It may be reasonably inferred
that Hemingway put Stendahls meiotic account of the battle of Waterloo
in the exclusive category of good and true books because it issues from
the experience of war and is no mere propaganda of one kind or another.
These true books are written by writers who are of such great probity
and honesty as a priest of God (Men at War xv). It is this rare combination
of experience of seeing a war and absolute artistic integrity and honesty
that allows Stendhal to reduce the details of what he observed to their
absolute necessary minimum, but no further. The rigorous pressures of
Napoleonic wars teach Stendhal to produce an imaginative iconic compression of the essence and truth of the battle of Waterloo as, say, only
Goya could have done. For, above all,
A writers job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the
truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience,
should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For
facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating
something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth.
(Men at War xv)

I should add here that Hemingways appreciation of Stendahls prowess as

a writer, which can create artistic absolute truth, is almost a direct endorsement of his own aesthetics and stylisticsalbeit in an encapsulated form
as he at least partially practiced it, for example, in A Farewell to Arms. On a
certain mythological plane, the war here serves the warrior-writer at once as
Hermes Trismegistus and Nik.
At first glance, this juxtaposition, of writing as an individual creative act
and war as a collective, destructive enterprise, may prompt some readers to
dismiss it as contrived, unconvincing, and morally suspectif not altogether
an appalling boast unworthy of a great writer. The immediate contemporary
temptation will be to disregard Hemingways seemingly idiosyncratic view of
the literary history of war as so much sadomasochistic bombast and relegate
it to the long regrettable list of crypto-Fascist justifications of blood lust.

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Immediately and in the abstract, this deceptive and dismissive attitude may
be justified. Further reflection, however, militates against this well meaning
but misleading initial reaction to a seemingly fundamental contradiction.
Today, psychoanalysis alone seems to be able to shed some light on the crepuscular psychic place where this contradiction dwells in Hemingway and
to offer an analysis of its structures that makes it visible and intelligible.
Freud boldly assures us that Eros and the death instinct seldomperhaps
neverappear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other
in varying and very different proportions and so become unrecognizable to
our judgment (Civilization 66). Later he comments, It must be confessed
that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that [death] instinct, we
can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background behind Eros,
and it escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed
with Eros (Civilization 68). Thus we are dealing with psychic structures that
contain alternative antagonistic but complementary movements; thereby we
do not simply love or hate but love-hate or hate-love, as it were, at the
same time. Similarly, we do not simply create but simultaneously create and
destroy or destroy and create. In other words; the Mephistophelean destructive impulse to reverse the process of creation in all things created also calls
forth its constructive opposite. Each of these antithetical impulses calls the
other forth and allies itself with it or they already coexist.
For my part, I will say that the most instructive aspect of Hemingways
metaphysics of war and Freuds psychoanalytic insights that one may acquire
here is to consider war largely as a secondary process. This insight allows the
death instinct to be apprehended as an unconscious primary process to be
experienced and sublimated in wars that are always consciously legitimized in
one way or another. War makes the unacceptable world destructive instinct
often acceptable, even highly desirable, to the superego through the agency of state and social sanction. A given group, state, society, or culture may
condone and encourage supreme violence as a legitimate praxis in wars and
conflicts to such an extent that the individual becomes a member of a group
in fusion through violence, to use the Sartrean terminology. Individual and
group violence sublimate the ever present destructive instinct as the love of
ones people, country, and state, dragging in their wake destruction and selfdestruction as well as the latent libidinal creative and reparative forces. The
latter makes the continuation and often, curiously enough, the prosperity of
human life, even for the vanquished, in post-war periods viable. The postWorld War II economic recovery and expansion of Germany and Japan bear
witness to the truth of this contradiction.
Now, if we return to the province of the arts, we also become aware, as
did Hemingway, that similar processes are at work in them. As psychoanalyst
Anthony Storr brings to our attention, This same aggressive impulse which

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can lead to strife and violence also underlies mans urge to independence and
achievement (78). In an extraordinary way, much like the aggressive pursuit
and consummation of sexual love, each artistic achievement demands that
artists aggress to some degree against the very sources that nourish their art.
This creative aggression is much more discernible in plastic arts such as sculpture and painting in which the natural order of matter undergoes the violence
of artistic transformation and manifests the ubiquitous inscription of human
work upon it as its ontological signature. It is less detectable in the art of
writing or music in which creative violence makes itself known respectively as
an act of aggression against the immense powers of language and of absolute
silence or relative silences. The nature of the writers violence against the real
or adopted mother tongue by violating its phonological, lexical, syntactic,
and semantic structures and norms in the name of a new linguistic creation
is shrouded in all the ambiguities of love and aggression the adult shows
toward the lost mother of infancy. The innovative writers aggression against
language falls into the category of what Lacan properly calls aggressiviti in
contradistinction to pure violence and destruction. Even the James Joyce of
Finnegans Wake does not seek to destroy the English language as such. Nonetheless, it is still a mode of warfare in which he engages. In The Origin of the
Work of Art, referring to Heraclitus thought on war as the father and king
of all, Martin Heidegger writes:
In the tragedy nothing is staged and displayed theatrically, but
the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The
linguistic work, originating in the speech of people, does not refer
to this battle; it transforms the peoples saying so that now every
living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy
and what unholy, what great and what small, what brave and what
cowardly, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave.
(43)

What Heidegger discloses in the preceding passage is this: the infinite

spiders web of psychic forces that we call the human mind is all of the same
piece. Each part of it is intricately interwoven with the rest, and touching
it at any given point affects the whole and puts us concurrently in contact
with all the rest. Touch the unholy and you are defiantly brushing against
the holy; speak of the Devil and the Good Lord is within hearing distance.
That is why Claude Lvi-Strauss can claim that there is no incompatibility
between artistic refinement and extremely cruel manners, which profoundly disturbs him (182). It is indeed disturbing because it is true.
I would propose, then, that Hemingways belief in the great advantage an
experience of war offers writers indicates his intuitive grasp of the dynamics

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133

of this complex synthesis of libidinal creation, sadistic destruction, and masochistic self-destructionand how, oddly, one always calls the others forth. As
an extreme situation, war reveals something of the nature of the writers own
imaginary work as a secondary process which is thoroughly permeated by sadomasochistic elements. So for writers, war generally synthesizes the unconscious,
preconscious, and conscious states and the immensities of the eventual effects
of their synthesis in intersubjective and intrasubjective life. One may assign
to them a place within the Jungian archetypal patterns because this synthesis
of war and writing (and before writing, between war and oral tradition), has a
recurrent history. The Freudian and Jungian views of individual and collective
unconscious satisfactorily become connected here in Hemingways views on
writing and war and lay claim to vaster domains of experience. In this light, the
commonalities between the origin and history of development of the arts and
creative writing and the metaphysics and psychoanalytics of war become more
discernible and comprehensible.
Despite such comprehension, it does not directly follow that war experience makes it easier for a writer to write. For Hemingway, quite the opposite
seems to have been the case. In a plaintive tone, he tells the Russian critic
Ivan Kashkin that war is complicated and hard to write about truly. He
then adds:
For your information in stories about the war I try to show all the
different sides of it, taking it slowly and honestly and examining it
from many ways. So never think one story represents my viewpoint
because it is much too complicated for that. (Letters 480)

This shifting viewpoint, representing war as a kind of Hegelian truth-inbecoming, whose aim is to surpass the circuits of received ideas and the logic
of the predictable, needs to realize and expand itself in the imaginal continuum. The upshot of it is that the writer does not merely catch a glimpse
of war as historys truth within the boundaries of a certain culture imposed
upon it. What is even more important is the writers refusal to consider
the truth of the individual participation in war as solely predetermined by
cultural prejudices and their supporting ideologies. Hemingway writes: I
would like to be able to write understandingly about both deserters and
heroes, cowards and brave men, traitors and men who are not capable of
being traitors. We learned a lot about all such people [in the Spanish Civil
War] (Letters 480). Such opposite qualities in the extreme belong to the
province of war, and a great writer draws lessons of immense value from
them about the human mind and the human heart, that is to say, the human
condition. These lessons do not lend themselves to sheer reportage. They

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can only be expressed through the alchemy of literary invention that draws
upon the primal war experience and not its doxa.
Beyond these primary considerations of the relation between war and
writing, there is another equally prominent one for Hemingway: justice. As in
the case of loving ones enemies as oneself, everything dismayingly appears to
conspire against the ideal of justiceequally in peacetime as in wartime. There
are those among us whose yearning for justice is as strong as our yearning for
love and peace. Perhaps it is even much stronger because we subconsciously
ask, if we cannot have love and peace, can we at least have justice? We long for
justice, not in the abstract or as a part of ethics that psychoanalysis places in
the realm of the superego, but as an abiding principle of life. The fact that it is
rarely so does not deter us at all. We may speculate that our longing for justice
has its roots in the vicissitudes of the infant-mother relationship, with the
infant experiencing anything less than the complete oneness with the mother,
no matter how brief, as an unending injustice. The more unjust and regressive
the society we live in, the more we regress to the infantile and the more acute
our desire for justice becomes. It may indeed end up to be our ruling passion, which is tantamount to an obsessional fantasy. In any case, Hemingway
believes that the artist of language, the writer, feels injustice more strongly
than others and is more vulnerable to it. He, too, clearly connects this sense
of injustice with the writers infancy and childhood. When asked, What is
the best early training for a writer? he unhesitatingly answers, An unhappy
childhood (By-Line 219). It is no doubt an extraordinary statement which
requires the space of a book to explore. When the writer subconsciously has
an intimation of childhood as a time of loss of the mother of infancy, and this
loss is later experienced as a generalized sense of injustice, writing no doubt
expresses a process of unbroken mourning. Correspondingly, Hemingway asserts with conviction that Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia.
Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. In a psychoanalytic sense,
it is Mother Russia that unjustly banishes one of her sons to live separately
from her. Unlike Stendhal, Flaubert had not seen war but he had seen a
revolution and the Commune and a revolution is much the best if you do not
become bigoted because every one speaks the same language. We know, of
course, that Flaubert was bigoted and politically reactionary by being against
the working classes. One might say; what does that exactly prove? Nothing
more than the fact that he profoundly experienced the sense of injustice, but
differently as we all do. And, somewhat unkindly, Hemingway fantasizes: I
wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary shock to
cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if they sent
Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas (Green Hills 71). Perhaps, because, much like Hemingway himself, Wolfe also had a troubled relationship
with his mother.2

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135

Finally, I would reiterate that for writers the aggressive-regressive and

libidinal aspects of war are repeated every time they attempt to write. As we
have seen, the battle is waged on every page against the unyielding nature
of language as an all-engulfing and transcendent reality wholly beyond total
appropriation. Language presents itself to the writer as the mother of all
desires and as an implacable enemy of unlimited conscious and unconscious
resources; in other words, an analogue of the mother of infancy. No doubt
in this context Hemingways multi-planar reference to James Joyce as a
great writer of our time, who keeps quoting from Edgar Quinet, Frache
et rose comme au jour de la bataille, makes remarkable sense (Green Hills
71). There is at once the sense of beauty, ecstasy, and the strange excitement
of the pending bloody battle. Since a total victory against the language by
the writer is out of the question, justiceat least in an abstract sensedemands that the writer not be entirely vanquished in this battle. So the most
decisive battle, even for the warrior-writer, is with the language itself, which
prompts Hemingway to declare, I want to run as a writer; not as a man
who had been to the wars . . . (Letters 712). Or as a disciplined writer, in
the manner of a Samurai warrior, he might have added, My daily routine is
now my field of battle (King 128). No serious writer is likely to challenge
this assertion. One may say that writing is a constant struggle against the
irreducible resistance of language, a resistance that issues from the alliance
of language with the unconscious primary process and demands a conscious
secondary process of expression in writingmost often involving a hugely
difficult task.
VI. On Life as Means to Knowledge
To sue to live, I find I seek to die;
And, seeking death, find life.
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (3. 1. 4243)
This is the world. Have faith.
Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (84)

For a considerably long time, I have been inclined to think that what partakes of the magical in the best of Hemingways work is its synthesis of the
primeval and the modern, the archaic and the contemporary, the simple and
the complex. Putting it more technically: the Hemingway brand of stylistic
sorcery captures traces of the unconscious primary-process as preconscious
intimations and, subsequently, transmutes them into the highly evolved
secondary-process of writing that subsumes the archaic and the archetypal.
Where this synthesis works well, the paleologic experiences of earth, air,

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water, fire, animals, plants, sexuality, birth, and death flow in confluence
with the modalities of their 20th-century lived experiences. To me, this vast
mysterious synthesis, combined with a highly tragic sense of lifewhich
consistently augments the irreparable sense of loss and its attendant mourningis the signal trait of the Hemingway style.
In turn, I have also believed that one of the elements that constitutes
the generative matrix of Hemingways stylistic synthesis and the elegiac dimension in his work is a new epistemology: the general field of experiential
knowledgewith all the energies, intricacies, and ultimate melancholy ambiguities that are inherent in it as its basic constituents. In this new epistemology, among all primal experiences, Hemingway admittedly privileges violent
death. Elaborating on writing about the twin themes of violence and death,
he explains in Death in the Afternoon:
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things,
and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is
violent death. It has none of the complications of death by disease,
or so-called natural death, or the death of a friend or some one
you have loved or have hated, it is death nevertheless, one of the
subjects that a man may write of. (2)

The two attentively articulated sentences combine the simplest with the
most fundamental. The simplest and the most fundamental, two seemingly contradictory elements, preoccupy Hemingway not only initially but
throughout all his writing life. On the one hand, violent death is one of the
simplest things because it makes manifest the inordinate vulnerability of the
individual human to death, annihilation, and eventual oblivion. The injection of a bubble of air into the human circulatory system nulls and voids its
integrity as an organic and biological unitinstantly and irreversibly. On the
other hand, violent death intervenes at the juncture where the enormities of
human existence and nonexistence are still proximal as Being is ushered into
Nothingness. So the dialectical opposition between the simplest and the
most fundamental in violent death has observable if mysterious conjunctive
consequences. It is precisely one of the subjects that a man may write of.
And it is an essential and perhaps potentially impossible task to attempt.
Furthermore, Hemingway tells us that The only place where you could
see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over was in the
bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it
(Death 2). But, after all, why study violent death, anyway? Wouldnt life, in
and of itself, be a large enough subject that a writer may legitimately study
and write of? What is exactly this close connection between life and death
beyond what might be given over to morbid and even sadistic curiosity or

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ghoulish fascination? In other words, theoretically, how can we make the

life-death problematics in Hemingways thought comprehensible? As one
might easily imagine, psychoanalytic answers to this question abound, some
of which I have already briefly discussed. A more instructive answer may
come to us from a sub-field of psychoanalysis, existential psychoanalysis, or
at any rate that segment of it which believes in the omnipresent reality of the
unconscious life. Rollo May, for instance, explains that Death in any of its aspects is the fact which makes of the present hour something of absolute value
(90). Within the relativity and contingency of human life, all human thought
and action of necessity remain relative and contingent. The very concept of
time, as chronos or operational time rather than lived time or kairos, with the
hour as one of its many subcategories, is a human construct and takes up an
originary place in theory of relativity. So how are we to understand the hour
as an absolute value; that is to say, an absolute present at the intersection of
chronos and kairos? Seen from the perspective of our present discussion, and
to speak Heideggers language, the relativity and subjectivity of this hour lays
claim to the absolute moment that my consciousness as an individual embraces the absolute certainty of my death. Heidegger might have called it the
hour of my authenticity. It is in the consciousness of the ever presence and
the absolute certainty of my death that my thought and action partake of the
dimension of the absolute and the immortal. This absolute hour envelops me
as I lay claim to the proximity of my death as a supreme integrative moment
of my life. My death coincides then with my life and becomes a part of my
flesh and blood. Viewed as absolutely proximal, life and death merge and
death incontrovertibly vivifies rather than mortifies life. Making my death an
inextricable part of my life unites the finite and the infinite in me. In a letter
to Charles Scribner, Hemingway reflects that there is no future in anything. I
hope you agree. That is why I like it at a war. Every day and every night there
is a strong possibility that you will get killed . . . (Letters 503). At first, there
being no future in anything appears to be an unnecessarily dramatic statement in an hour of despair, both, noncommonsensical and counterintuitive.
To the contrary, however, in the absolute presence or the proximity of death, it
makes a telling point: our certainty of the omnipresence of death confers immortality upon the present and renders it absolute To use the language of an
invocation of the Lakota, and perhaps the Northern Plains warriors generally,
in a war one may perpetually say: For those that this day belongs to, it is a
good day to die(Le ampetu kin tab kin wastekte).3 Again, here is Hemingway
meditating further on the same subject in a letter:
I think there is a steady renewal of immortality through storms,
attacks, landings on beaches where landing is opposed, flying, when
there are problems and many other things which are all awful and

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horrible and hateful to those who are not suited to them. . . . These
things make a katharsis [sic] which is not a pathological thing,
nor seeking after thrills, but it is an ennobling thing to those who
are suited for them and have the luck so that they survive them.
(Quoted by Meyers 400401)

If not the tone, certainly the intent of Hemingways remarks is Hegelian:

facing the possibility of death and surviving it signifies a negation of negation; which in turn, elicits a feeling of immortality when what is negated is
death. These are lived experiences that concurrently bestow on us mortals
feelings of our unbearable lightness of being, as Milan Kundera might
have put it, and its very opposite, a feeling of the unbearable heaviness of
immortality, rendering us fleetingly godlike. They generate a transcendental and regenerative passion for Hemingway, generally approximating the
sense of Christs passion, a deliberately and freely chosen mode of being
in suffering and self-sacrifice in the name of experiencing a fundamental
truth. Such lived experiences at once represent the summation of ones
individual life and its conjunction with what incomprehensibly lies forever
beyond it. Thus they primarily represent in Hemingways writings the
principium individutionis rather than another symptom of masochism. In
other registers, one may refer to these experiences as moments of pure sublimation which infuse them with the sublime and the mystical. Such experiences are sublime to the extent that they combine horror and beauty; they
are mystical because, as Hemingway reminds us, those who are suited for
them risk their lives in searching for them. They do so to have a palpable
feeling of the mystery of being at its very point of contact with potential
harm or eventual annihilation. Put differently: whoever is ready to lose all
is also and at the same time ready to gain immeasurably in transcendental
experiences, a notion that gives Winner Take Nothing a new dimension.
It would seem logical to conclude that for Hemingway the sublime pushes
itself beyond Freudian reality and the pleasure principle toward what Lacan
calls the Death Drive, approximating the unbearably ecstatic jouissance
state. Furthermore: the experience of the sublime involves vaguely known
and dimly understood masochistic desires augmenting its unconscious side,
increasing its affective appeal and its appearance of grandeur. If Hemingway properly considers them as cathartic, it is because they are at once so
fearsome and ecstatic as to create a blissful trance, much in the manner of
a breakthrough in the analytic situation. Such experiences release all the
pent-up masochistic yearnings, making manifest an occult truth of their
own without which a crucial part of the existential perspective of human
life would be lost. From a dual phenomenological and psychoanalytic
viewpoint, Ludwig Binswanger relatedly also observes that

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life and death are not opposites, that death too must be lived, and
that life is encompassed by death, so that both from a biological
and a historical point of view the saying holds true that the human
being dies in every moment of his existencethis insight was in
a certain sense familiar even to Heraclitus. Indeed, for Heraclitus
Hades, the god of the Underworld, and Dionysus, the God of the wildest
intoxication of Life, for whom everyone rages and raves, are the same.
(294 emphasis added)

Returning to tauromaquia, the crucial point to grasp here is Hemingways

insistence in seeing life and death in the bull rings of Spain in a new
light. For me, it is clearly not cruelty as such that he wants to see. Initially
he expects not to like bullfights because of the poor horses. He relates
that I had just come from the Near East, where the Greeks broke the legs
of their baggage and transport animals and drove and shoved them off the
quay into the shallow water when they abandoned the city of Smyrna . . .
(Death 2). The juxtaposition of images of drowning horses with broken
legs in the Near East and their evisceration in the bull ring is evidently not
what he seeks. What he does wish to find, to experience, to study, to learn
from is that dark and mysterious point where the finite and relative open
onto the infinite and the absolute; that is, where human life asymptomatically touches the environing mysteries. Hemingway is very emphatic on the
necessity of learning, informing Malcolm Cowley:
Every year [I] keep on studying, keep on reading and every year
study something new to keep head learning. Learning is a hell of
a lot of fun. Dont see why cant keep it up all my life. Certainly
plenty to learn. (Letters 604)

Bullfights are exciting to Hemingway because while they are going on they
represent a way of learning, with life as means to knowledgeor, more
accurately, in Miguel de Unamunos words, with the tragic sense of life as
a medium of access to knowledge. This tragic knowledge is highlighted in
violent death in war and in the ritual violence of the bullfight. In a confessional tone, he tells us that
So far, about morals, I only know that what is moral is what you
feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and
judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight
is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and
have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and
after it is over I feel very sad but very fine. (Death 4)

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Now one may better apprehend how the love of the bullfight lends itself to
this admixture of Eros and Thanatosso bewildering to so many readers
and criticswhich is the guiding principle of Hemingways observations on
war and violent death.
After what has been said, I hope the preceding sections come into better focus and Hemingways interest in war and peace in their multiplicity
of forms becomes more accessible and understandable. This interest goes
far beyond the superficial and excessively simple-minded comments such as
Charles Whitings that Hemingway is only a writer who glorified action,
violence and war (83). After all due consideration, Hemingway may be said
to be more on the side of Raymond Aron, who against all odds argues for
the hope of a gradual, ultimate reconciliation of the human race (143). Or
one may cautiously associate him with William Faulkners reassuring vision that man will not merely endure, he will prevail (8). Faulkners vision
is one of thorough humanism, unaware of the coming of the structuralist
anti-humanism and the nostalgia for a return to new modes of 19th century
scientism and determinism in the twilight years of our 20th century and its
humanist failures.
Epilogue
Theres no one thing thats true. It is all true.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (467)

As I see it, essentially, Hemingways vision reveals itself not so much as

war against peace; or life against death; or creation against destruction; or
self-generation against self-destruction but as a hint of a mystical vision of
the interconnectedness of all things harmonious and disharmonious, reconcilable and irreconcilable, and, yes, fraternal and fratricidal in lived human
experience. I would say that there is an integrative wholeness in this vision
that is much vaster and exceedingly more complex than what one might
technically refer to as a compromise formation. Consciousness of it allows
us to make forays into that undiscoverd country which, following Freud,
we have come to call the unconscious, a country whose borders are closed to
intrusions of time and space, as we understand and experience them in our
conscious life, and death and oblivion as we imagine them.
I have tried to place Hemingways views on war and peace in an intertextual, philosophical, psychoanalytic, ethical, aesthetic, and literary context.
To push this effort infinitesimally further and to provide an ending, or at
least a sense of an ending, I will simply say that this undiscoverd, and
perhaps undiscoverable, country is no more than a horizon. It stretches ahead
of us beyond Faulkners the last red dying evening. At this receding twilit

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horizon, all light is but a mere gradation of the light of a human day which
stubbornly refuses to die and the penumbra of the ambient ancient night, unseeing and unhearing. After all, Hegel counseled us that The owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with the falling dusk (13). Perhaps in our struggle for
preserving what is left of our humanity against the coming of a post-human
world, it will not be merely a twilight of the gods that we shall encounter but
the predawn of an all-encompassing human consciousness, anticipating the
mystics dark sun, awaiting the awakening of new integrative myths up to now
slumbering in our unconscious and as yet unknown to us and our history.

No t e s
1. I visited La Finca Viga several times while attending the First International
Hemingway Conference in Havana, Cuba (July 1623, 1995).
2. For an account of the vicissitudes of Wolfes early relationship with his
mother see John S. Terrys interview with Julia Wolfe in Elizabeth Nowells Thomas
Wolfe: A Biography (23).
3. I am grateful to Robert W. Lewis for providing me with this information,
quotation, and translation.

Wor k s Ci t e d
Aron, Raymond. On War. Trans. Terence Kilmartin. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribners, 1969.
Binswanger, Ludwig. The Existential Analysis School of Thought. In Existence: A New
Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. Eds. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F.
Ellenberger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958.
. The Case of Ellen West. In Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and
Psychology. Eds. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1958.
Clausewitz, Karl von. On War. Trans. Anatol Rapoport. London: Penguin, 1982.
Faulkner, William. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. In Nobel Prize Library. New York:
Helvetica, 1971.
Freud, Sigmund. Anxiety and Instinctual Life. In New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
. A Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. In Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 10. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1957.
. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton,
1962.
Gray, J. Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. 1959. New York: Harper & Row,
1970.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegels Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1942.
Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans.
Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribners, 1932.
. A Farewell to Arms. 1929: New York: Scribners, 1949.
. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribners, 1940.

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. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribners, 1935.

. Introduction. Men at War. New York: Crown, 1942.
. Introduction. Treasury for the Free World. Ed. Ben Raeburn. New York: Arco, 1946.
. Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter. In By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.
Ed. William White. New York: Scribners, 1967. 205212.
. Selected Letters 19171961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribners, 1981.
. On the American Dead in Spain. In Remembering Spain: Hemingways Civil War
Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Ed. Cary Nelson. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994.
. On the Blue River: A Gulf Stream Letter. In By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Ed.
William White. New York: Scribners, 1967. 237246.
. Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter. In By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.
Ed. William White. New York: Scribners, 1967. 213220.
James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1902. New York:
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Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy and the World: Philosophical Essays. New York: Regnery, 1989.
King, Winston L. Zen and the Way of the Sword. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lacan, Jacques. crits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. Conversations with Claude Lvi-Strauss: Claude Lvi-Strauss and Didier
Eribon. Trans. Paula Wissing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. New York: International
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May, Rollo. Contributions of Existential Psychiatry. In Existence: A New Dimension in
Psychiatry and Psychology. Eds. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Murdoch, Iris. Mass, Might, and Myth. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York:
Vintage, 1968.
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Nowell, Elizabeth. Thomas Wolfe: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1960.
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Thomas, Dylan. The Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1971. 196197.
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Whiting, Charles. Hemingway Goes to War. Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999.

M atthew J . B ruccoli

Class Ten: A Farewell to Arms

Farewell to Arms is regarded as being close to autobiographical, as a

novel based on what happened to Hemingway in World War I and on his
unhappy love affair with a nurse in Milan. The evidence shows that A Farewell to Arms has very little to do with Hemingways war experiences apart
from the fact that Frederic Henry and Ernest Hemingway were wounded
in much the same wayin the legs by shrapnel. But the chronology makes
closer identification impossible. A Farewell to Arms begins in the summer of
1915. It ends in the spring of 1918, after the Italian retreat from Caparetto
late in 1917. Ernest Hemingway did not get to Italy until the summer of
1918. He was wounded in July 1918. The military events of A Farewell to
Arms were over and done with before Ernest Hemingway ever got to Italy.
The war material in the novel is fiction written from books. Its a research
job. For those of you who may be interested in seeing how Hemingway
researched this novel I recommend to you Michael Reynolds Hemingways
First War, which documents where Hemingway borrowed his information
about the Italian front. It also indicatesthis is a much more important
pointhow Hemingway was able to make this second-hand material his
own. It is no wonder that people have assumed that A Farewell to Arms was
autobiography. It doesnt read like something written from reference books,
but that is what the war part is. As for the love part, it is well known that

Classes on Ernest Hemingway (Columbia, S.C.: Thomas Cooper Library, University of South
Carolina, 2002): pp. 103141. Copyright Matthew J. Bruccoli.

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Hemingway fell in love with a nurse at the hospital in Milan in 1918. Her
name was Agnes Von Kurowsky. She was not British as Catherine Barkley
is. Agnes was an American, despite the Von Kurowsky name. Like many of
the women in young Hemingways life, she was older than he was. Hemingway assumed that they were to be married after the war. He returned to the
United States to find a job and prepare for their marriage, but he received
from her what used to be called a Dear John. Hemingways reaction was
pain and outrage, which he first put into A Very Short Story, where we
have A Farewell to Arms done in three pages or so about an American who
falls in love with his nurse in Italy, comes back to the United States, and
is jilted. The tone of that little piece is angry or nasty. By the time that
Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms the nastiness had faded, and he was
able to invest the experience with an elegiac tone. At the same time, it is
possible to detect A Farewell to Arms operating as retaliation. Hemingway
gets even with Agnes by killing off Catherine at the end of the novel. He
also makes the love affair in A Farewell to Arms better than it could possibly
have been in real life.
From the overture, the two-page opening, we can see Hemingway planting connections and contrasts for future development. The rain/death connection and the fertility/infertility contrast. The mountains and the plains, yes;
but thats a problem because it is unclear what Hemingway was doing with
this contrast and whether he did intend to develop it consistently through the
novel. Well come back to that. The most obvious connection, of course, is rain
and death. But, Hemingway at his best doesnt use these things blatantly. He
doesnt erect a billboard announcing Five Miles to the Next Symbol. Where
his symbols work best, they work organically: they emerge naturally from the
material as part of the materialso naturally that you dont have to see them
as symbols.
In the late summer of that year. . . . From the history of the war its got
to be 1915. Why doesnt Hemingway say so? I suppose because hes trying
to open the novel with a sense of pastness; to say in the late summer of 1915
has a specificity about it which doesnt produce quite the same effect. . . . .we
lived in a house in a village that looked across the river. . . . Weve identified
that river and water symbolismthere will be all kinds of water: Frederic
Henry will jump into a river to save his life, and later he and Catherine will
undertake a journey across a lake which becomes a journey to a new life. It
also turns out to be journey to death. . . . across the river and the plain to
the mountains. Here we have, still in the first sentence, that low-land, highland contrast, which I dont think works consistently. In the bed of the river
there were pebbles and boulders dry and white in the sun. Critics have tried
to do something with the pebbles and boulders. I dont think you have to do
anything with them. Theyre just pebbles and boulders. Sometimes a boulder

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is just a boulderit doesnt stand for anything. The pebbles and boulders are
not symbols of destruction or anything else. And the water was clear and
swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down
the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. Okay, here
we do have something going on: dust standing for everything from infertility
to death, as in the funeral serviceAshes to ashes, dust to dust. The soldiers
walking raised the dust, which is appropriate because the soldiers are engaged
in death. They will kill and be killed themselves; as they go by, they leave a
deposit of dust on the leaves. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the
leaves fell early that year. All right, we dont have to go into that at any length:
early fall and early end of fertility. And we saw the troops marching along
the road and the dust rising and leaves stirred by the breeze falling and the
soldiers marching and afterward the bare road white except for the leaves.
The leaves have now fallen into the roadbed with the dust. The plain was
rich with crops. This is the first point at which there is going to be trouble
about the mountain/plain contrast. Carlos Baker argued that in this novel the
mountains, the high-lands stand for cleanliness, peace, health; but that the
low-lands stand for death and disaster and destruction. He cites, for example,
that Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley are happiest in the mountains
while they are waiting for the termination of her pregnancy; when they come
down from the mountains she dies. But take a look at this first chapter where
Hemingway is carefully laying out the rules of his novel, and you will see that
nothing of the kind obtains. In this first chapter the mountains are associated
with death, not goodness, not cleanliness, not peace, not tranquility.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of
fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and
bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could
see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer
lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling
of a storm coming.
Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under
the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There
was much traffic at night [Maybe Hemingway is doing something
with night/day; maybe he isnt. Sometimes details are just details.]
and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each
side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried
men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved
slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the
day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with
green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the
tractors. [One of the things Hemingway does in this novel is

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to point out the way in which war reverses the natural order of
things. Here the green leafy branches and vines which normally
are associated with growth and nature in its abundance have been
perverted to the purposes of war. They have become camouflage
for instruments of death.] To the north we could look across a
valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another
mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that
mountain too [Notice again that mountains mean fighting, war,
death, destruction.] but it was not successful, and in the fall
[here it comes] when the rains came the leaves all fell from the
chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black
with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and
all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. [Wet
equates with dead.] There were mists over the river and clouds
on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were
wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on
the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of
clips of thin long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the
capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though
they were six months gone with child. [That is the most effective
symbol in this chapter. The cartridge boxes of the soldiers make
them look pregnant, but what they are pregnant with is death.
Hemingway is planting the connection between pregnancy and
death. The novel repeats that war reverses the natural order of
things. War takes the normal expectations of life and turns them
into their opposite. Here pregnancy foreshadows not birth, not
life. But death. The men are pregnant with 6.5 mm. cartridges.]
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with
the rain came the cholera. But it was checked [Heres Hemingway
with one of his perfect throwaway lines.] and in the end only seven
thousand died of it in the army.

I have no evidence whatsoever, but Im prepared to place a substantial

wager that this opening chapter was inserted later. I suspect that Hemingway began writing the novel, and then later on he realized that he needed to
introduce certain themes, to plant certain symbols. This chapter gives me the
impression of something written later to connect with what has already been
done. There is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. My supposition is not
meant to diminish the achievement of that opening chapter. Its superb. I
mention my idea to point out something about the way in which novels are

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written. In most cases writing a novel is a process of discovery. The author

finds out what he wants to say, what he has to say, through the process of writing it. Having discovered his symbols, it is quite natural and proper for the
author to go back and write the first chapter or the second chapter in which
he sets up certain parallels, certain contrasts or connections. Writing has been
described as the process of making connections. The connections may not be
perfectly clear to the author until he works them out on paper. Hemingways
second wife said that he thought with his fingers. That is an excellent definition of the process of writing: thinking with your fingers. During a newspaper
strike one of the columnists was asked what he thought about an event, and
he replied, I dont know what I think until Ive written it. Theres probably a
good deal of that in Hemingway.
What I intend to do now is go through A Farewell to Arms with you and
point out certain scenes, certain passages, which seem to be the high points
of the novel. The first such scene comes in Chapter 15, where Frederic Henry
is being examined in the hospital. The Three Stooges have just leftthe three
doctors who were afraid to operate. One of them cant even read the X-ray;
hes looking at the X-ray for the wrong leg. Its a comic scene: theyre amateurs. Then comes the pro. In Hemingways work there are these characters I
call the pros. Theyre not necessarily code heroes because oftentimes we dont
know enough about them. They can be minor characters, as Dr. Valentini is
here. Hes gone in two pages, but the contrast between Dr. Valentini and the
Three Stooges who just left is a perfect example of how to tell the good guys
from the bad guys in Hemingways work and in his world:
Two hours later Dr. Valentini came into the room. He was in a
great hurry and the points of his mustache stood straight up. He
was a major, his face was tanned and he laughed all the time.
How did you do it, this rotten thing? he asked. Let me see
the plates. Yes. Yes. Thats it. You look healthy as a goat. Whos the
pretty girl? Is she your girl? I thought so. Isnt this a bloody war?
How does that feel? Youre a fine boy. Ill make you better than
new. Does that hurt? You bet it hurts. How they love to hurt you,
these doctors. What have they done to you so far? Cant that girl
talk Italian? She should learn. What a lovely girl. I could teach her.
I will be a patient here myself. No, but I will do all your maternity
work free. Does she understand that? Shell make you a fine boy.
A fine blonde like she is. Thats fine. Thats all right. What a lovely
girl. Ask her if she eats supper with me. No I wont take her away
from you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Miss. Thats all.
Thats all I want to know. He patted me on the shoulder.
Leave the dressings off.

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Will you have a drink, Dr. Valetini?

A drink? Certainly. Ill have ten drinks. Where are they? [The
Three Stooges didnt drink.]
In the armoir. Miss Barkley will get the bottle.
Cheery oh. Cheery oh to you, Miss. What a lovely girl. I will
bring you better cognac than that. He wiped his mustache.
When do you think it can be operated on?
To-morrow morning. Not before.

The other guys said they had to wait six months. As well find out, Valentini is going to do a good job. Here we have Hemingways always strong
contempt for the amateurs, for the ones who dont know how to do itwhatever it happens to be. We will find Dr. Valentini all over Hemingways work
with different names, and different occupations.
The end of Chapter 19: Catherine says, Im afraid of the rain because
sometimes I see me dead in it. Thats a bit much. Hemingway rather overworks that device. One of the problems with the novel is Catherines rather
stagy talk. She talks like somebody in a novel.
Chapter 21: Catherine has told Frederic Henry that she is pregnant.
He is less than overjoyed, and she says, We mustnt [fight]. Because theres
only two of us and in the world theres all the rest of them. If anything comes
between us, were gone and then they have us. [The them/they syndrome.]
They wont get us, I said, because youre too brave. Nothing ever happens
to the brave. Apart from they/them, something else is going on here, which
is Hemingways fondness for dramatic irony: people making confident statements which will prove to be wrong and which may even function as jinxes.
This ties in with that sense of doom. Whenever in Hemingways work we find
a character making sanguine remarks about the future, thats a point to pay
attention because the chances are that the result will be just the opposite.
Chapter 23: Catherine and Henry are in that brothel-like hotel room
in Milan before he goes back to the front. After we had eaten we felt fine,
and then after, we felt very happy and in a little time the room felt like our
own home. My room at the hospital had been our own home and this room
was our home too in the same way. Running through this novel is emphasis
on Catherines ability to make wherever she is home-like, despite the fact
that these two people never have a home but instead hospital rooms or hotel
rooms or rented rooms in somebody elses house.
Chapter 28: One of the most quoted passages in the novel, one of the
most quoted passages in all of Hemingways work. Hemingway on patriotism. An Italian soldier has just made a speech about what has been done
this summer cannot have been done in vain and Frederic Henry thinks:

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I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words

sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had
heard them, sometimes standing in the rain [Note the rain.] almost
out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and
had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by the
billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had
seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory
and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing
was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words
that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of
places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain
dates and these with the names of the places were all you could
say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory,
honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names
of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers
of regiments and the dates.

This passage calls attention to another popular misreading of Hemingway. Hemingway is thought of as a writer who celebrated heroism in battle as
a masculine value. If ever there was an anti-war novel, if ever there was a novel
that says that war is senseless slaughter, its this one. A Farewell to Arms is one
of the novels written in the Twenties by men who had seen the war and who
utterly rejected the values of war and the conduct of war. E. E. Cummings
The Enormous Room and John Dos Passos s Three Soldiers come to mind; there
were more. Until the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Hemingway regularly denounced war.
Chapter 32: This picks up on that passage we just had about the rhetoric
of war. Here Frederic Henry thinks:
You had lost your cars and your men as a floorwalker loses
the stock of his department in a fire. [Notice the comparison.]
There was, however, no insurance. You were out of it now. You
had no more obligation. If they shot floorwalkers after a fire in
the department store because they spoke with an accent they had
always had, then certainly the floorwalkers could not be expected
to return when the store opened again for business. They might
seek other employment; if there was any other employment and
the police did not get them.
Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.
[A farewell to arms.]

Chapter 34: I had made a separate peace.

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The reunion of Catherine and Frederic Henry in Stresa before they go

to Switzerland, another one of Fredericks soliloquies. You may notice that he
does an awful lot of pontificating:
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to
kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks
every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But
those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very
gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you
can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

This is one of the most admired, one of the most quoted, passages in the
novel. Here we have Hemingways explanation that They kill the brave and
the good who are not breakable. He is talking about Catherine specifically,
but this statement can be generalized into Hemingways cosmic view. Notice
the word impartially. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very
brave impartially. Theres no malice. They act impartially.
The final chapter is peppered with They/Them. Catherine is in the delivery room and is in danger: So now they got her in the end. You never got
away with anything.
More of Catherines doom-talk, with They:
Im not brave anymore, darling. Im all broken. Theyve broken
me. I know it now.
Everybody is that way.
But its awful. They just keep it up till they break you.

More They. Frederic Henry has just learned that the baby has strangled
on its umbilical cord. Now Catherine will die.
That was what you did, you died. You did not know what it was
about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you
the rules, and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.
Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo, or gave you the syphilis
like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on
that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Hemingways admirers see this as a statement of a brave mans acceptance of the way things are. Other readers see it as a statement of self-pity.
There doesnt seem to be any irony or distance here. Frederic Henry is in rebellion against death. This is followed by a much-quoted metaphysical statement of mans predicament:

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Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was a full of
ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went
first toward the centre where the fire was; then turned back and ran
toward the end. When there were enough on the end, they fell off
into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burned and flattened, and
went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them
went forward toward the fire and then back toward the end and
swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember
thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid
chance to be a messiah and lift the log off of the fire and throw it
out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do
anything but throw a tin cup of water onto the log, so that I would
have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I
think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.

This is Hemingways view of what its like to be God. What seems to be

divine intervention, a cup of water, may be just another form of death.
Finally, Catherines last words: Dont worry darling, Catherine says,
Im not a bit afraid. Its just a dirty trick. Death is a dirty trick.
I went through these passages for two reasons. One reason is that I will
talk about them some more and I want you to be thinking about them. The
other reason is to try to convey an impression of what the impact of this book
was like in 1929. It seemed absolutely new. Hemingway was seeing life the
way it had never been seen by any major American author except Stephen
Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. Hemingway develops ideas about
mans predicament in sentences and paragraphs that read almost like entries
in a rule book. How to live with They/Them; where to find the courage to survive with the knowledge that inevitably They/Them will get you.
Hemingway apparently never knew what he was going to call his novels
until after he had written them. Then he would go through the Bible or the
Oxford Book of English Verse and look for phrases loaded with implication, and
pick one that worked for his novel. A Farewell to Arms is one of Hemingways
most admired titles. It has everything. It has a nice rhythm to it. It has a
meaningful ambiguity: arms meaning war; arms meaning love. Its perfect
for this novel. Nonetheless, it is a little disturbing to me that Hemingway
found his title by engaging in what might be called a title search. It would
seem better for the title to develop in the course of writing, for the author to
find his title while he was writing the novel. Its very instructive that we have
Hemingways list of possible titles for A Farewell to Arms. I am now working
from the book by Bernard Oldsey called Hemingways Hidden Craft. A possible title was from these two lines Love is an fervent fire / Kindlit without
desire. I dont know which of these words he was going to use. A World to

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See. Patriots Progress [ironic title]. The Grand Tour [ironic title]. The
Italian Journey [flat, noncommittal title]. The Worlds Room [not bad].
Disorder and Early Sorrow [Thomas Mann used that title]. An Italian
Chronicle [the same as The Italian Journeynot a grabber]. The Time
Exchanged. Death Once Dead. They Who Get Shot [wise-guy title].
The Italian Experience. Love in Italy. Love in War. Hes getting to it. He
wants a title thats going to hook up love and death, love and war. Education
of the Flesh. The Carnal Education. The Sentimental Education of Frederic Henry [too many words]. I have Committed Fornication / But that was
In Another Country / And Besides the wench is dead. Well, Hemingway must
have cursed the day he used up that title In Another Country. The Sentimental Education [a title Flaubert had used already]. Sorrow for Pleasure.
A Farewell to Arms. That comes from a poem by George Peele written in
the late sixteenth century. The poem is written as though by a soldier who has
served Queen Elizabeth I in war. Hes now too old to serve as a soldier and
will devote his declining years to praying for his queen. Late Wisdom. The
Enchantment. If You Must Love. World Enough and Time. In Praise
of his Mistress. Every Night and All. Of Wounds and Other Causes.
The Retreat from Italy. As Others Are. Nights and Forever. The Hill of
Heaven. A Separate Peace. Hemingway was looking for a title which would
convey a sense of loss or detachment. The best of them are faintly bitter.
A Farewell to Arms was serialized in Scribners Magazine in 1929, before
book publication. Its a good rule when a novel has been serialized to compare
the serial version and the book version. There may be meaningful differences.
In the case of A Farewell to Arms, in addition to revised passages, including
the end of the novel, there is a difference in structure. The novel as you have it
is divided into five books, five big sections with chapters within these sections.
Therefore it is natural for many people to conclude that the structure of the
novel resembles the five-act structure of a play. That works pretty well. But the
manuscript is not divided into five books; neither are the magazine installments. The evidence indicates that Hemingway discovered he had a five-part
structure sometime between magazine publication and book publication. It
may not have been planned that way.
F. Scott Fitzgerald didnt see the typescript of A Farewell to Arms until
after the novel had started to appear in Scribners Magazine. Im going to
go through Fitzgeralds vetting report in detail because it reveals some of
the strengths and weaknesses of the novel. The document was discovered by
Charles Mann and published with his commentary as F. Scott Fitzgeralds
Critique of A Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1976, pp.
140153. I said when we talked about The Sun Also Rises that Fitzgerald was
an excellent critic; moreover, his criticism of Hemingways work was without
malice or jealousy. He seems to have been motivated by his honest desire to

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help Hemingway. The letter is a list of points. Fitzgeralds first point refers to
Chapter 19 of the book, the scene in which Frederic Henry meets Mr. and
Mrs. Myers and the opera singers in Milan. Fitzgerald wrote that it is slow +
needs cuttingit hasnt the incisiveness of other short portraits in this book
or in yr. other books. The characters too numerous + too much nailed down
by gags. Please cut! Theres absolutely no psychological justification in introducing those singersits not even bizarre. If he got stewed with them + in
consequence thrown from hospital it would be O.K. At least reduce it to a
sharp + self sufficient vignette. Its just rather gassy as it is, I think. Fitzgerald
is noting that in Hemingways novels there are occasional non-functional
scenes. Theyre probably there because they had some meaning for him that
doesnt quite come across the paper. Fitzgerald continues: For example
your Englishman on the fishing trip in T.S.A.R. contributes to the tautness
of waiting for Brett. You seem to have written this to try to round out the
picture of Milan during the war during a less inspired moment. Fitzgerald
is contrasting the way the fishing interlude in The Sun Also Rises functions in
terms of the rest of the novel and the way this bar scene just hangs there.
In Cat in the rain, + the story about Thats all we do isnt it?
Go + try new drinks etc. [Hills Like White Elephants] you were
really listening to womenhere youre only listening to yourself,
to your own mind beating out facily a sort of sense that isnt
really interesting, Ernest, nor really much except a sort of literary
exerciseit seems to me that this ought to be thoroughly cut, even
re-written.
(Our poor old friendship probably wont survive this, but there
you arebetter me than some nobody in the Literary Review that
doesnt care about you + your future.)

Next, in Chapter 20Catherine and Frederick at the races:

This is definately dullits all right to say it was meant all the
time + that a novel cant have the finesse of a short story but this
has got to go. The scene as it is seems to me a shame.
Later I was astonished to find it was only about 750 wds. which
only goes to show the pace you set yourself up to that point. Its dull
because the war goes further + further out of sight every minute.
Thats the way it was is no answerthis triumphant proof that
races were fixed!
I should put it as 400 word beginning to Chap XXI
Still later Read by itself it has points, but coming on it in the
novel I still believe its dull + slow.

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[Important point here:] Seems to me a last echo of the war very

faint when Catherine is dying and hes drinking beer in the Caf.
[Well come back to that.]
Look over Switzerland stuff for cutting.

Chapter 21 of the book has the scene in which Frederic Henry meets
an English officer at the club in Milan and the Brit cheerfully tells him that
everything is cooked. Fitzgerald commented:
This is a comedy scene that really becomes offensive for youve
trained everyone to read every wordnow you make them read
the word cooked (+ fucked would be as bad) one dozen times. It
has ceased to become amusing by the 5th, for theyre too packed, +
yet the scene has possibilities. Reduce to five or six cooked it might
have rhythm like the word wops in one of your early sketches. [You
should remember that from in our time.] Youre a little hypnotized
by yourself here. [Fitzgerald is saying that sometimes Hemingways
device of word repetition becomes gimmick. It doesnt work
properly when it is over done.]

Chapter 21 includes the scene in which Catherine announces shes

pregnant. Fitzgerald wrote: This could stand a good cutting. Sometimes
these conversations with her take on a nave quality that wouldnt please you
in anyone elses work. Have you read Noel Coward? Some of its wonderful
about brave man 1000 deaths ect. Couldnt you cut a little? [Fitzgerald will
come back to this criticism again. The point of his criticism is that Catherines
speech seems, as I said before, stagey. She seems to be saying things for an
audience. She talks portentously: I sometimes see me dead in itreferring
to rain.]
Chapter 21 againFitzgerald still doesnt like Catherine Barkley:
Remember the brave expectant illegitimate mother is an old
situation + has been exploited by all sorts of people you wont lower
yourself to readso be sure every line rings new + has some claim
to being incarnated + inspired truth or youll have the boys apon
you with scorn.
By the waythat buying the pistol is a wonderful scene.
[Chapter 23.]
Catherine is too glib, talks too much physically. In cutting their
conversations cut some of her speeches rather than his. She is too
glib

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I meanyoure seeing him in a sophisticated way as now you

see yourself thenbut youre still seeing her as you did in 1917
thru nineteen yr. old eyes. In consequence unless you make her
a bit fatuous occasionally the contrast jarseither the writer is
a simple fellow or shes Eleanora Duse disguised as a Red Cross
nurse. In one moment you expect her to prophecy the 2nd battle
of the Marneas you probably did then. Wheres that desperate,
half-childish, dont-make-me-think V.A.D. feeling you spoke to
me about? Its thereherebut cut to it! Dont try to make her
make senseshe probably didnt!

P. 241 is one of the best pages youve ever written, I think. This is the
passage in Chapter 34 about people bringing so much courage to this world
that the world has to kill them to break them. Fitzgerald wrote in the margin
of the typescript: This is one of the most beautiful pages in all English literature. Hes overstating it, but it shows the intensity of his reaction to Hemingway, a reaction that was not unusual at the time. For many of Hemingways
readers his works seemed like scripture.
On pages of your text of Farewell to Arms you have dashes. Hemingway
had attempted in 1929 to print the word cocksuckers, and Fitzgerald warned
him that the book would be suppressed + confiscated within two days of publication. There was no way that word could have been published by Scribners
in 1929 or 39 or 49 or even 59. Fitzgeralds next point refers to Chapter 30,
the retreat and Frederic Henrys arrest by the battle police.
All this retreat is marveleous the confusion ect.
The scene from 218 on is the best in recent fiction.
I think 293294 [the opening of Chapter 40] need cutting but
perhaps not to be cut altogether.
[Important:] Why not end the book with that wonderful paragraph
on p. 241? [If people bring so much courage to this world.] It is
the most eloquent in the book + could end it rather gently + well.

Hemingway tried it. This is worth remembering, because the ending of

A Farewell to Arms has been greatly admired for its understatement. It gave
Hemingway a great deal of trouble, and at one point he followed Fitzgeralds
suggestion. He took that passage about If people bring so much courage to
this world and tried it out as an ending. Didnt work. Fitzgeralds last note
to Hemingway is A beautiful book it is!underneath which Hemingway
expressed his appreciation by writing Kiss my ass, EH. Its always dangerous
to help a writer. They dont want helpful criticism. They want praise.

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I just told you that Fitzgerald didnt like the opening of Chapter 40.
Please turn to the opening of that chapter. Im about to read you what the
manuscript has. It is what Hemingway originally intended to use instead of
what you have in print:
We had a fine life; all the things we did were of no importance
and the things we said were foolish and seem even more idiotic
to write down but we were happy and I suppose wisdom and
happiness do not go together, although there is a wisdom in being
a fool that we do not know much about and if happiness is an end
sought by the wise it is no less an end if it comes without wisdom.
[Thats pretty badHemingway at his windiest.] It is as well to
seize as to seek it because you are liable to wear out the capacity
for it in the seeking. To seek it through the kingdom of Heaven
is a fine thing but you must give up this life first and if this life
is all you have you might have remorse after giving it up and the
kingdom of heaven might be a cold place in which to live with
remorse. They say the only way to keep a thing is to lose it and this
may be true but I do not admire it. The only thing I know is that if
you love anything enough they take it away from you. This may all
be done in infinite wisdom but whoever does it is not my friend. I
am afraid of God at night but I would have admired him more if
he would have stopped the war or never let it start. Maybe he did
stop it but whoever stopped it did not do it prettily. And if it is the
Lord that giveth and the Lord that taketh away I do not admire
him for taking Catherine away. He may have given me Catherine
but who gave Rinaldi the syphyllis at about the same time. [Those
two things are hardly comparable.] The one thing I know is that
I dont know anything about it. I see the wisdom of the priest at
our mess who has always loved God and so is happy and I am sure
that nothing will ever take God away from him. But how much is
wisdom and how much is luck to be born that way? What if you
are not built that way? What if the things you love are perishable?
All you know then is that they will perish. You will perish too and
perhaps that is the answer; that those who love things that are
immortal and believe in them are immortal themselves and live
on with them while those that love things that die and believe in
them die and are as dead as the things they love. [Awful.] If that
were true it would be a fine gift and would even things up. But
it probably is not true. All that we can be sure of is that we are
born and that we will die and that everything we love will die too.
[Hardly a profound conclusion after all this cosmic marinating.]

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The more things with life that we love the more things there are
to die. So if we want to buy winning tickets we can go over on the
side of immortality; and finally they most of them, do. But if you
were born with loving nothing and the warm milk of your mothers
breast was never heaven and the first thing you loved was the side
of a hill and the last thing was a woman and they took her away and
you did not want another but only to have her; and she was gone;
then you are not so well placed and it would have been better to
have loved God from the start. But you did not love God. And it
doesnt do any good to talk about it either. Nor to think about it.

Hemingway at his most pretentious. Its close to self-parody.

I read that cancelled opening of Chapter 40 to show you that it is very
instructive to look at a writers working drafts. One of the gauges of good
writing is bad writing. We can assess a writers style by examining passages
in which his style doesnt work. Here there are wordy sentences, fumbling
for meaning, attempts to find or to suggest profundities and deep meanings
that dont emerge. Hemingway is dealing with the system of divine justice, a
subject that gave Milton trouble in Paradise Lost. Hemingway at his best is
superb. But when his discipline slips, he becomes self-indulgent and pretentious. The prophetic Hemingway is not the great Hemingway. He was thirty
when this novel was published. With the advantages of hindsight, it is possible to detect in A Farewell to Arms the beginnings of the Papa image, the
beginnings of the wise old man. At the age of thirty he began to show signs
of being impressed by his own wisdom.
A final point on the Fitzgerald/Hemingway relationship. Hemingways
note at the bottom of Fitzgerald document indicated his displeasure with
Fitzgeralds advice. It was not a passing displeasure. For the rest of his life
Hemingway remembered this letter with incremental resentment, so that
when Charles Poore was editing the Hemingway Reader, Hemingway wrote
him in 1953, fourteen years after A Farewell to Arms was published:
I did the last of the re-write in Paris Im pretty sure. Or maybe
the proofs there. I rewrote the last chapter over 40 times but I hope
it does not read that way. Now I remember; Im sure the last rewrite was done in Paris. Because I had a long letter sent over by F.
Scott Fitzgerald in which among other things, he said I must not
under any circumstance let Lt. Henry shoot the sergeant [Not in
the letter I read to you.] and suggesting that after Catherine dies
Frederick Henry should go to the caf and pick up a paper and
read that the Marines were holding in Chateau-Thierry. [Not in
the letter I read to you.] This, Scott said, would make the American

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public understand the book better. He also did not like the scene
in the old Hotel Cavour in Milano and wanted changes to be
made in many other places to make it more acceptable. Not one
suggestion made sense or was useful. He never saw the Mss until it
was completed as published.

There are several untruths there. Hemingway did act on certain Fitzgerald suggestions. He cut that opening of Chapter 40, and he tried to move
the line about If you are very brave this world will kill you. . . . It is not
true that Fitzgerald did not see the novel until it was published. He saw it
in June, well before the novel was published. There may have been another
letter; theres no certainty that Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway just one letter
about A Farewell to Arms. The thing that seemed to have irked Hemingway
the most, because he mentioned it to other people, was his displeasure at
Fitzgeralds suggestion that there be a reminder of the war at the end of the
novel. If Hemingway can be trustedand he cannotFitzgerald suggested
that while Catherine is dying in the hospital, Frederick Henry reads in the
paper about the Western Front in France. Hemingway regarded that as an
absurd suggestion. Nevertheless, the thematic tension of the novel, as shown
in many of the trial titles, is love and war. The plan of the novel, very roughly,
is soldier meets nurse; soldier makes separate peace because values of love
replace values of war; then nurse dies in way not connected with war. It
would not have been absurd for Hemingway at the end of the novel to have
reintroduced a suggestion of the war background, reinforcing the irony of
Catherines death despite the circumstance that Catherine and Henry have
made a separate peace. Since their love is triggered by war and since they
believe they can escape the war, it might have been effective to reintroduce a
reminder of the war at the very end.
Maxwell Perkins also advised Hemingway to bring in the war at the end
of the novel:
The first point relates to the combination of the two elements
of the book,Love and War. They combine, to my mind, perfectly
up to the point where Catherine and Lieutenant Henry get to
Switzerland;thereafter, the war is almost forgotten by them and
by the reader,though not quite. And psychologically it should
be all but forgotten;it would be by people so profoundly in love,
and so I do not think what I at first thought, that you might bring
more news of it or remembrances of it into this part. Still, I cant
shake off the feeling that War, which has deeply conditioned this
love storyand does so still passivelyshould still do so actively
and decisively. It would if Catherines death might probably not

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have occurred except for it, and I etc., might have been largely
responsible. If it were, and if the doctor said so during that awful
night, in just a casual sentence, the whole story would turn back
upon War in the realization of Henry and the reader. [24 May
1929]

Whos just read A Farewell to Arms for the first time? All novels are susceptible to time. This book which made such a strong impression on readers
in the Thirties and Forties may have become a little old-fashioned.
***
I want to go over some of the main concerns in A Farewell to Arms. Ill
begin with this one. A Farewell to Arms is obviously a love story, and it is
Hemingways first extended love story. The Sun Also Rises is a love story in
which the love cannot be consummated; it is an un-love story. A Farewell to
Arms is Hemingways first novel with a heroine. Brett is in no way the heroine of The Sun Also Rises. Shes the principal female figure, but shes there as
a kind of warning example of what a woman should not be. Today I want
you to tell me what this novel says about women and about the relationship
between men and women which goes under the label of love. Hemingway
on women. Hemingway on love. Hemingway on the value of love. The
function of love. Who needs it? Why? And what are the roles, what are the
responsibilities, what are the duties and obligations of men and women in
love? Is it more grief than its worth? Or does it give life value and meaning and significance? You can talk about women separately. Or you can talk
about men separately. Or you can connect them up.
***
MJB: Well, shes supposed to be a little screwy in the beginning. She says,
Tell me that youre my own true love, and youll come back to me. The loss
of her fianc in the war has left her a little unbalanced, and one of the effects
of new love with Frederic Henry is to cure that condition. So here you can
argue that love is a healing thing. Assuming that Hemingway regards love
as a positive thing that makes life meaningful, how does love function in A
Farewell to Arms?
***
MJB: In the world of the novel we see that love is therapeutic and healing.
Catherine and Henry are certainly better off being in love than not being in
love. Shes a little nutty until she falls in love with him; and he has a gap in
his life which he fills with alcohol and whores. He describes his leave, about
which he says that he was drunk in most of the cities of Italy, and when

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he woke up in the morning he was never sure who was in bed with him:
it sounds like that shouldve been a good time, but it wasnt. When he and
Catherine find each other everything they do together enhances their pleasure. And we have the speech of the priest when he comes to visit Frederic
Henry after Henry is wounded but before he goes to Milan where his affair
with Catherine really commences. The priest talks about the value of love; he
says that love means wanting to do for someone, love means wanting to sacrifice, love means giving up things for the one loved. Does that work? Does
Frederic Henry live up to these rules? Giving up and sacrificing?
***
MJB: Shes his home. It is a one-sided relationship. Catherine worries
whether Frederic is happy, whether hes pleased, whether hes bored, whether
hes comfortable, whether hes having a good time. What makes love meaningful from the mans point of viewwhich is the narrators point of view,
which is Frederics point of view, which is Hemingways point of view?
Remember from whose point of view this story is told. This is Frederic
Henrys story told by Frederic Henry. Everything you hear, everything you
read is filtered through him. In a way, poor Catherine doesnt exist in the
novel except as Frederic Henry tells us about her. What he tells us about
her is how devoted she was, how much she loved him, how much she was
committed to his happiness, his pleasure. Given this lopsided situation, it is
then fair to ask why love is accorded such importance in this novel and other
novels by Hemingway. Why does Hemingway insist on the worth, on the
necessity of love? Whats good about it?
***
MJB: What happens when Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley fall
completely in love? That is, after they consummate their relationship. What
happens to these two people in terms of the rest of their lives, the rest of
the world?
They cut themselves off. Their love leads to self-isolation, and its isolation compounded. It begins with an American man and a Scottish woman
falling in love in Italy. There is in the geographical setting a quality of artificiality, a quality of rootlessness. Then to escape from the things that threaten
them in Italy, they flee to another country, Switzerlandwhich has always
been the country of refugees and exileswhere they cut themselves off even
further. In Italy they knew people. In Switzerland they know no one. What
do they do in Switzerland? Well, they presumably devote a good deal of time
to what we might term bedsports, and they play cards. They get a book and
learn two-handed card games. You wonder how they pass the time for the
months they live in Switzerland. What do they live on? They live on sight

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drafts. Frederic Henry goes to the bank and cashes drafts on his grandfather
in America, which his family then honors. They live comfortably on what is a
mild form of larceny. He has no occupation. Were told that before the war he
was studying architecture. It mightve been anything because theres nothing
architectural about him. He never refers to his career ambitions except once
to say that Catherine would be very good with his clients-assuming that after
this is all over, he will be able to resume school. The point Im making is the
complete artificiality of their existence. Theyre tourists, and not even tourists
touring on their own money. Theyre touring on the proceeds from the sight
drafts that his family in America is honoring, temporarily. Their life together,
their love together, has a quality of unreality about it. It is a love that does not
have to cope with normal human situations, normal human problems. They
live in hotel rooms. Theres no permanence. Catherine has none of the responsibilities of a wife. Frederic has none of the responsibilities of a husband.
All they do is amuse each other. It sounds damn dull to me. The novel insists
on the power, on the necessity of love, but it presents this artificial love that
can thrive only in isolation.
Although Hemingway celebrates love, or at least insists on the need
for love, there is a streak of misogyny that runs through his work. Hemingway distrusts women. He created what might be called ideal women, such as
Catherine Barkley in this novel and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tollsan ideal woman being a woman who knows her place, who knows her duties, who
knows her obligations, who is devoted to the well-being of the man. He created these women who have been described as lobotomized; yet he also created some of the grandest bitches in literature: destructive, devouring, maneating women. These two things operate side-by-side. One is there for the
sake of illuminating the other. The bitches help define what a good woman is
by contrast. When we talked about the short story Now I Lay Me, in which
young Nick remembers what a bitch his mother was and how she destroyed
his fathers manhood, I said that this could be seen as Nicks first great wound:
the wound of realizing that his father had been unmanned by his strong and
ultimately destructive mother. It is not difficult to conclude that Hemingway
vowed that it would never happen to him, that no woman would destroy him
or unman him. But this misogyny, this distrust of the destructive powers of
women does not take the form of doing without them. It takes the form of
finding a good woman and then educating her in her womanly duties: which
are to tote the barge and lift the bale and always be good-humored and to
share his interests and to be concerned above all with his happiness and comfort and pleasure. Frederic and Catherine live in a never-never land with no
real duties, no real problems. The only way this kind of love can flourish is in
an artificial environment. Hemingways great love stories are always short in
duration and doomed because they carry the seeds of the doom in themselves.

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It cant last. Sooner or later, Frederic Henrys going to come home some night
and theres no dinner; and Catherines going to explain that the dishwasher
isnt working, and the plumbing isnt working, and the toilets stopped up, and
whatve you been doing all day-sitting around drinking with the boys? Real
life would get in the way of this idyllic artificial isolated life. Therefore when
we come back to reality, it has got to end in the death of one or both partners.
Catherine Barkley dies here. The man dies in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the
odds are ten to one that Maria will die soon after Robert. The man dies in
Across the River into the Trees. They are doomed loves because they are not set
up in terms of real people with real responsibilities and real problems and real
troubles in a real world. Theyre idyllic. Idyllic means too good to be true, or
too good to last. Idyllic means temporary.
***
MJB: In the first class I said he was an anti-romantic romantic. He does
away with one kind of romanticism and supplies another kind. Look at
all of the great love stories in literature and drama and myth and legend.
Theyre all unhappy love stories. Theyre all tragic. They all end at a peak
of ecstasy because they cant go on. Romeo and Juliet die in their teens. Can
you envision the old age of Romeo and Juliet? No. So in a sense Hemingway is operating within a romantic tradition of tragic doomed love affairs.
In very simplified terms, what Hemingway does is take romantic material
and try to make it seem unromantic and real by his technique, by style
primarily. But take away the Hemingway style, take away the Hemingway
understatement, and take away the Hemingway objectivity-then you have
some pretty romantic stuff. The men behave heroically, like knights in days
of yore. Notice, for example, that in Hemingways heroes, theres a streak of
knight errantry. The knight by himself, not part of an army, but the knight
alone riding out alone to redress wrongs, to rescue maidens in distress,
and slay dragons. Frederic Henry is a foreigner. Hes in somebody elses
army. Same thing in For Whom the Bell Tolls; Robert Jordan is a foreigner
in somebody elses army, somebody elses country, somebody elses war. In
A Farewell to Arms the point of view has a good deal to do with this whole
matter of love, isolation, women, men. I said this before: remember whos
telling the story; and then ask yourself when he is telling it. Frederic Henrys
telling the story; therefore it is his story told from within his value system.
The when is important because the when is later. How much later we dont
know, but later. The story is not written as a running account or a log of
what happened while it was happening. Theres a retrospective effect. This
is Frederic Henry some years later, two years or five years or ten years. The
novel was published in 1929; the action ends in 1918. You could argue that
the time of publication was the time of Frederic Henrys telling of the story,

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so that there is the effect of distance from the actual events. Whatever the
novel says about men and women in love, it represents the years of Frederic
Henrys assessing and re-assessing of what happened. As Ive already said,
its Frederic Henrys book. Catherine comes with the bed.
Now; shift to another topic: If love is doomed what then does the novel
say about the meaning of the experience. Ill put it another way, an easier
way. One of the things that is said over and over again about fiction, is that
the major characters in a work of fiction change, mature, grow, develop. Im
not so sure about that. Ive never observed actual people grow, change, mature, or develop much beyond the age of twenty. Whatever development,
change, and evolution Ive seen occurs early. But lets deal with the literary
situation. I grew up hearing in classes that when you read a novel this is what
you look for and this is what you write your paper aboutgrowth, change,
development, maturation. Does that work in this novel? Im trying to get
from the question of the growth of Frederic Henry to the question of what
is the meaning of experience.
***
MJB: Instead of portraying the putative changes in characters, skillful
writers reveal the truth about their characters. In life we gradually learn
about people. They at first seem to be one way, but we discover that they
are really something else. Ostensibly truthful people prove to be liars. But
they havent changed. They are what they always were. You have to find
that out. I have not discovered significant change in grown-ups outside of
fiction. Have you?
Student: Well, I was taught to look for it, too. And I certainly dont see it
here. Theres supposed to be some kind of metamorphosis, change, and I dont
see it here. Hes still shallow and empty in the end.
***
MJB: It would be an overstatement to say that he doesnt change at all. He
undergoes a great loss, a great shock, a great hurt. Inevitably these things
have their effects, but theres no massive change in the character. He learns,
for example, the value of love. In grossly oversimplified terms, he learns
that being in love with and living with Catherine is better than going to the
whorehouse, but thats to trivialize the thing. Its more than that. He learns
that love can provide a stay against emptiness and loneliness. Hed never
been loved before he met Catherine. The experience teaches him certain
things. I dont say he doesnt learn anything. I say he doesnt change in any
fundamental way. The priests speeches seem to be written in neon lights:
they seem to be signals for the reader. Every time the priest talks about love
and sacrifice and unselfishness, you have the feeling that those speeches are

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planted by the author and you better read them carefully because theyre
going to apply later on. Youre going to have to use them. It seems to me that
Frederic Henry does not live up to the various tests that the priest sets up.
The priest says that love requires sacrifice, and I dont see Frederic Henry
doing any sacrificing at all. You cant even say that he sacrifices his military
career. The battle police are getting ready to shoot him. He doesnt give up
anything for Catherine. He flees to her from execution. Being in love with
her doesnt seem to make him more generous, more caring, more giving.
Hes a taker, not a giver. Their relationship resembles a horny teen-age boys
daydream of what it would be like to have a mistress and ample money and
to do nothing except to engage in pleasures of the flesh.
***
MJB: I will deal with what I am capable of dealing with. In terms of literature I think that Hemingway is saying that Frederic Henry starts off
not looking for love. Hes never known it before. Hes not sure that hes
capable of it or that he wants it. He begins, as he says, playing a game
with Catherine-the love game, the sex game, whatever you want to call it.
Then it turns into something else. But it turns into something else under
very special circumstances. Hes wounded. He arrives at the hospital, and
then there she is. It gives their love a kind of momentum. The situation is
artificial. How many of us are going to fall in love under circumstances like
that? How many of us are going to be wounded in battle and shipped to a
hospital where the girl nurses us, loves us, and yields everything to our pleasure, comfort, and happiness? Again, theres an impetus to the CatherineFrederic relationship to which I apply this word Ive been usingartificial. For artificial you could use the word romantic. The circumstances
couldnt be more romantic, which means more unrealistic. Hemingway was
writing a kind of love-adventure story. This much I do know about human
conduct: setting and timing are very important. If for example, Catherine
and Frederic had met before the warlets say had he been studying architecture in London and he met her at a party or reception or something
what wouldve happened? Maybe nothing. The circumstances under which
they do consummate their love provide the experience with an outside force.
Their love is accelerated by, intensified by the circumstances. The whole war
mentality: live for the moment; we may all be dead by tomorrow. That is
another reason why so many love stories are written against a wartime background, because during war everything happens faster, everything seems
to be more valuable because time is more valuable, because time is running
out, because death is imminent. Hemingway, like most other writers, was
dealing with standard situations. There are very few new plots; there are
very few new stories. What the writer does is take old plots, old stories, old

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characters, and make them seem new and fresh and different. But the material here is as old as the Trojan War.
***
Now, let me do some summarizing. Given the doom in Hemingways work,
given the fact that from the first meeting of Frederic Henry and Catherine
Barkley, any astute reader knows shes doomed. As soon as she appears in
the novel you can see it coming: one way or another shes not going to be
alive at the end of this novel. Given this built-in doom, this built-in inevitability of loss, what then remains in the novel to provide a system of the
values of living? What makes life worthwhile? How does a Hemingway hero
construct a system of values? How does Frederic Henry learn? He does not
change, but he learns. Whats the learning experience? Whats it based on?
How does it function?
Student: One of the ways that he learns is from love. Well, for example,
in the beginning of the book when he does drink and he does go to the
whorehouse, he knows he doesnt like it, but he doesnt know why he doesnt
like it. From having the experience of love he gets an idea of why he didnt like
doing those things in the first place.
***
MJB: Right. The Hemingway hero does all his learning from experience.
That isnt as elementary as it sounds, because Hemingway says that there
are some people who are capable of experiencing more and better than other
people. And there are those on whom experience is wasted. A Hemingway
hero has highly developed experiencing capabilities. He notices more and
enjoys more than other people. His whole framework of values is based on
what he has felt, seen, tasted and on what he has learned from feeling, seeing, tasting. He lives for pleasure. Hemingway says again and again that life
is a rotten, disappointing thing; but, my God! you can have pleasure in it.
Catherine says that death is a dirty trick. But before they get you, you can
have a lot of pleasure-in particular, the pleasures of the senses. Hemingway
couldve made a good living as a restaurant critic. Notice how he describes
meals. Characters in other novels walk into restaurants, eat a meal, and thats
it. Hemingway tells you what they ordered, tells you how it was cooked, tells
you how it was served, tells you whether it was good or not. Same thing with
booze. And within the limits of 1929 taste and censorship, the same thing
with sex. Hemingway had to do a lot of tippy-toeing around the bedroom
scenes here because he couldnt get away with much in 1929. Nonetheless,
the same thing holds for the pleasures of sex as holds for the pleasures of the
table and the bottle. Having learned through experience what is good, what
is better, what is best, the tragedyif thats what it isis that its going to be

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taken away from you. That leads to the question that Im not going to deal
with today, but Im going to plant it today because you should be thinking
about it: Is tragedy possible in the world of Ernest Hemingways fiction?
Is what happens in A Farewell to Arms tragic? Or is it something else? Is
it something like tragedy but not the same thing? Did Hemingway write
tragedies? Can you have a tragedy when death is a dirty trick? Think about
it; its important. And think about thisIm just restating the same thing:
substitute for tragic the words dignity or heroism. Are dignity or heroism possible in this framework? Ill say it another way: Do the pleasures of
life, do the values taught from experience ultimately have any meaning? Do
they allow for life or death with dignity? One last thought: It has been said
that Hemingways heroes are concerned with survival. Is that true? If so,
what threatens them? Why is it necessary to have a system of defense?

M ark C irino

You Dont Know the Italian Language Well

Enough: The Bilingual Dialogue of
A Farewell To Arms

n a Farewell to Arms, Ralph Simmons (aka Enrico DelCredo) is incapable of

singing opera like a true Italian, and therefore suffers the indignity of having
spectators throw benches at him. When Frederic Henry is captured on the
banks of the Tagliamento River, his accent also exposes him as non-Italian,
and officers in his own army suspect that he is German and nearly execute
him. It is in the interest of both men to speak Italian as natives, but they
cannot. Hemingways representation of the inherent gap between Italianspeakers and English-speakers mirrors the inevitable confusions of war. In
addition to the nearly fatal mistaking of Frederic for a German, he is also
mistaken for a Frenchman by a doctor; for an Austrian officer by a barber;
for an Italian from North or South America by an Italian sergeant; and for
a South American by a bartender. In an extension of his decade-old practice
in representing the Italian language in his prose, and a precursor of his more
acclaimed technique in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway captures this
ethnic and linguistic uncertainty by manipulating word choice, tense, grammar, and the translation of phrases.
Before investigating Hemingways use of Italian in A Farewell to Arms,
it is important to contextualize his history with the language prior to writing the novel. In March 1918, preparing to depart for Europe, Hemingway announced to his sister, I now study French and Italian, although
The Hemingway Review, Volume 25, Number 1 (Fall 2005): pp. 4362. Copyright 2005
The Ernest Hemingway Foundation.

167

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the details and depth of these studies are unclear (Sanford 275). Michael
Reynolds believes that Hemingway did not acquire a significant amount of
Italian through lessons in Kansas City, but rather through direct immersion
while in Italy. Reynolds writes:
Hemingway spoke no Italian when he arrived in Italy and
probably very little more when he returned to Milan wounded
six weeks later. During his stay in Milan he picked up enough of
the language to make his way on the streets and in the cafs, for
he apparently had a quick ear for language and the gift to make
himself understood with a limited vocabulary. He was, however,
by no means as fluent as Frederic Henry. (179180)

Hemingway arrived in Italy in early June, and, lack of expertise notwithstanding, began enthusiastic boasts about his Italian not long afterwards. Gee
I have darn near forgot the English language, he wrote in late June to a former Oak Park High School classmate. If Cannon or old Loftbery could hear
me speak Italian all day long they would roll over in their graves (SL 11).
On 8 July, Hemingway was blown up at Fossalta di Piave; one month
later he wrote to his older sister Marcelline on American Red Cross stationery, gleefully plunging into novice Italian, joking that she has not written to
him because she loves another lieutenant. Hemingway then translated into
English what he had attempted to write in Italian, adding, Tis thus that the
old master learns the Italian language. He can speak it with great fluency
and on my return we shall journey to Italian restaurants downtown where
I will demonstrate. The letter is filled with other lighthearted boastshe
dubs himself The Hero of the Peehave, and blusters, Merely because I am a
great man do not stand in awe of me! (8 August 1918, JFK Library, reprinted
with changes in At the Hemingways 282283). The bilingual bombast continuessix weeks later in a letter to two of his sisters, he wrote:
Now Ivory [Marcelline] I will give you a full list of the old masters
titles and other stuff. Tenente Ernesto Hemingway; proposto al
medaglia dargento (valore) proposto per croce dguerra. Ferito
da Prima Linae dGuerra. Promotzione for Merito DGuerra.
Translated Lieut, cited for the Silver valour medal, cited for the
war cross, wounded in the first lines and promoted for merit. Now
aint he stuck up? He aint though, I hope. (21 September 1918, JFK
Library, reprinted with changes in At the Hemingways 287289)1

The letter shows Hemingway as enamored of his knack for writing bilingually (however incorrectly) as with his new military decorations.

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In another letter, this one written to his mother in late August, Hemingway claimed:
Now Mom you may not believe it but I can speak Italian like
a born Veronese. You see up in the trenches I had to talk it,
there being nothing else spoken, so I learned an awful lot and
talked with officers by the hour in Italian. I suppose Im shy on
grammar but Im long on vocabulary. Lots of times Ive acted as
interpreter for the hospital. Somebody comes in and they cant
understand what they want and the nurse brings em to my bed
and I straighten it all out . . . Ive gotten Italian pretty well . . . I
know more French and Italian now than if I had studied 8 years
in college . . . (Griffin 8586)

Hemingways long on vocabulary claim, of course, contradicts Reynolds

assertion of his limited vocabulary.
Then, in a moving 18 August letter to his family, which he refers to as
the longest letter Ive ever written to anybody, Hemingway unveils a narrative technique that he would use to portray Italian speech in short stories
and in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway recounts the events surrounding his
wounding, and then reproduces a conversation he had with a captain:
I told him in Italian that I wanted to see my legs, though I
was afraid to look at them . . . They couldnt figure out how I
had walked 150 yards with a load with both knees shot through
and my right shoe punctured two big places. Also over 200 flesh
wounds. Oh, says I, My Captain, it is of nothing. In America
they all do it! It is thought well not to allow the enemy to perceive
that they have captured our goats!
The goat speech required some masterful lingual ability but I
got it across . . . (SL 1415, emphasis added)

Here the nineteen-year old Hemingway uses three strategies that are
crucial to understanding his representation of the Italian language throughout
much of his career. First, he is determined to make sure his readers know the
language in which the dialogue occurs. To Hemingway, the language which a
character is speaking affects the authenticity of a scene. Second, Hemingways
technique of literal translation debuts in the letter. He includes the translation of an Italian phraseof nothingto convey the language in which
the action occurs. Of nothing seems awkward, but matches di niente, a
phrase used to minimize something the speaker has done, as if the act was no
great effort or inconvenience. Third, notwithstanding his self-deprecating and

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ironic description of the masterful way he translated the American vernacular phrase get ones goat into Italian, Hemingway often overestimated his
aptitude. His pride in acquiring this new language would surface in his prose,
occasionally resulting in errors.
As in The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms is an
American abroad, where he must interact with the natives. For Jake Barnes,
language is not a problem. He is able to speak Spanish or French when he
needs to, establishing himself as an insider rather than a tourist. Jake also
surrounds himself with a coterie of English speakers. But while Frederic, like
Jake, has an English-speaking love interest, his communication in his second
language is more crucial; he must command Italian soldiers in their native
tongue. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway needed to balance contradictory
challenges, representing members of the Italian Army speaking to each other
as authentically as possiblein Italianwhile still allowing the novel to be
understood by an English-speaking readership. His main strategy in overcoming these obstacles was to produce literal translations of common Italian
phrases and words. Hemingway had improbably employed the technique in
his 1918 letter home, continued its use in early short stories, and would make
it a centerpiece of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which he offered a similar, but
far more flamboyant performance with the Spanish language.
This technique has been examined thoroughly with regard to For Whom
the Bell Tolls, where critics point to strategies similar to those seen in A Farewell to Arms. Carole Moses writes that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway
imitates the vocabulary and sentence structure of Spanish, creating a highly
stylized prose (215). Milton M. Azevedo calls the same technique an admirable stylistic experiment in which Hemingway manipulates English and
Spanish syntax and vocabulary to convey the impression that the characters
are speaking Spanish (30). Both observations could also apply to Hemingways treatment of the Italian dialogue in A Farewell to Arms.
In the decade between the 1918 letter and A Farewell to Arms, two short
stories illustrate Hemingways developing technique for presenting Italian
speech in fiction. In Out of Season, written in April 1923 (Smith 16), the
guide Peduzzi asks the young gentleman if he can have five lire for a favor
(CSS 139). This awkward phrase is not Peduzzi speaking clumsy English; it
represents the Italian phrase for pleaseper favore. The two Italian words
mean for favor, which Hemingway appropriates for Peduzzis dialogue.
Something quite similar occurs in Che Ti Dice La Patria?, written in April
and May 1927, less than a year before Hemingway began A Farewell to Arms
(Smith 193). The narrator informs a young Italian man that he will be uncomfortable riding on the outside of the car, to which the Italian responds,
That makes nothing. I must go to Spezia (CSS 223). That makes nothing
denotes non fa niente, a common phrase to say that something does not

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matter. Fa is the third-person singular conjugation of the Italian verb fare,

meaning to make or to do. Though strictly English-speaking readers may
not understand exactly why the odd that makes nothing is used, they still
can intuit from the phrasing that there is a mediation between the English on
the page and the original language the characters are speaking. Hemingways
narrators supply that mediation.2
From the earliest draft of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway used narrative
strategies to capture Frederics impossible task of seamless assimilation into
Italian conversation. The original beginning thrusts the reader in medias res
after the lieutenant (then a third-person protagonist named Emmett Hancock) has been wounded. When an administrator in the hospital tells him
I cant understand Italian, Emmett responds, I can speak English (qtd. in
Oldsey 94). This exchange matches Hemingways claim in his letter home
that he served as a translator while in the hospital, straightening out everyone
elses confusion. He will eventually position it at the beginning of Book Two,
where Frederic helps a nurse to understand his Italian stretcher-bearers.
In the first drafts second chapter, Emmett awakens to see a beautiful
nursea Miss Fairbanksin his hospital room. When she asks him his rank,
he responds Tenente, which Hemingway then deleted and changed to EnglishLieutenant (qtd. in Oldsey 96). This change evidences Hemingways
focus on realistic representation. Had the wounded Emmett been communicating with an Italian administrator, Tenente would be appropriate; to an
English-speaking nurse, Lieutenant is logical. Not only do such details contribute to the verisimilitude of A Farewell to Arms, but as Michael Reynolds
notes, they also add an important component to Frederic Henrys character.
The effect of allowing Catherine little or no language ability, Reynolds writes,
is to put Frederic in the dominant position in their relationship (180).3 Even
in the novels draft, it is evident that the protagonist does not want to cede
linguistic control to his love interest. Frederic says that he did not know what
he was getting into and did not care very much. For him, it is enough to see
and talk with a beautiful girl who speaks English and to have some place to go
in the evenings beside the brothel for officers (see JFK 64).
Hemingways experimentation with Italian in A Farewell to Arms continues in the first draft. In the original version of the priests hospital visit
to the convalescing Frederic, Hemingway sketches an exchange in which
the priest asks Frederic to name the things he loves about life. Frederics response is a revealing catalogue: The night. The day. Food. Drink. Girls. Italy.
Pictures. Places. Swimming. Portofino. Paris. Spring. Summer. Fall. Winter.
Heat. Cold. Smells. Sleep. Newspapers. Reading. Then Frederic confides to
the reader: This all sounds better in Italian (qtd. in Reynolds 286). Even
at this remarkable point where Frederic lists his twenty-one passions in a
cathartic secular confession, he explicitly addresses the gap in language, as a

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reminder that the narrative is only a representation of the action, a translation

filtered through his linguistic acumen. The seemingly offhand remark also
adds to our knowledge of Frederic. By suggesting that what was said sounds
better in Italian than what is being represented in English, the narrator puffs
his language skills while simultaneously deprecating his story and its unfortunate but unavoidable linguistic limitations.
As the scene continues in manuscript form, the linguistic gap separating
the Italian priest and the American soldier is augmented not only by word
choice, but by verb construction. In the draft, the priest says, I was afraid I
shake your faith and then, I take your greetings to the mess (qtd. in Reynolds 286287), clinging to the present tense in both sentences instead of using the conditional and the future respectively. Hemingway reconsidered this
scene; he ultimately eliminated the first comment, and while in the published
version the priest still says he will relay Frederics regards, he uses correct
grammar: I will take your greetings to the mess (73, emphasis added).
The above scene illustrates Hemingways flirtation with representing a
conversation in pidgin Italian, and then deciding against it. Of course, the
imperfect language spoken by the priestwhich Hemingway discarded
echoes the captains tortured language in the published novels early mess hall
scene. In that version, the narrator makes explicit mention of the captains
speech patterns: The captain spoke pidgin Italian for my doubtful benefit, in
order that I might understand perfectly, that nothing should be lost.4 When
the captain speaks, readers understand what the narrator means; the captain
tells Frederic, Priest to-day with girls and Priest not with girls and then
Priest every night five against one (7).
Hemingways use of pidgin Italian to convey lack of fluency recurs at a
moment of tremendous tension. Emilio, the barman in Stresa, warns Frederic
that he will be arrested the following day. Frederic asks him, What time do
they come to arrest me? and then What do you say to do? (265), two examples of verbs in the present tense when the future and conditional, respectively, are called for. The Italian is not incorrect because Frederic is too panicked to speak properly; nor is this an example of Frederic not knowing how
to speak with fluency. Instead, Frederic chooses to speak in the simplest tense
to make certain that he does not commit any errors. Frederics simplification
is an example of Sheldon Norman Grebsteins observation that the dialogue
of A Farewell to Arms, when represented as Italian, has a certain formality of
expression which hints at the protagonists . . . concentration in speaking the
language correctly (120). This time, with his life on the line, it is Frederic
who speaks pidgin Italian so that nothing should be lost.5
Central to Hemingways method of conveying foreignness is his literal
translation of everyday Italian words and phrases into their English counterparts. Hemingway chooses Italian words whose corresponding words in

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English are not typically used in the same contexts, producing the effect of
stilted, slightly awkward speech. The result remains understandable to the
English-speaking reader, but still slightly unnatural. The effect is not drastic,
but noticeable, the equivalent of changing the color of a wall from white to
off-white. The English produced through this method is even charming, like
an Italian speaking unpolished English, or technically perfect English with
an accent.
Throughout Hemingways history with the technique, he favors the
most common Italian words and phrases to translate. When Rocca, an officer in A Farewell to Arms, tells the priest a story that Rinaldi rejects as implausible, Rocca responds, Just as you like (39). The phrase does not quite
fit; it is too proper, even stodgy for an officers bull session in the mess hall.
Just as you like, however, is meant to conjure the everyday Italian expression come vuoi, a catchall phrase of deference, meaning, in this case, think
whatever you want. The same phrase recurs when Rinaldi wonders whether
his syphilis might require a medical leave. Drunk and frustrated, Rinaldi asks
for the priests opinion, and the priest tells him, Just as you like (175); in
other words, Have it your way. The odd, stylized English here paradoxically
conveys a very common and ordinary phrase in Italian.
While the English-speaking reader encountering just as you like may
not associate the phrase specifically with come vuoi, the allusion should not
lead to a misreading of the dialogue. To understand Hemingways method
of representation is to realize that the characters are speaking a foreign language normally, not an unnatural brand of English, and certainly not awkward, formal, or archaic Italian. Hemingway chooses an Italian phrase that,
when translated, will produce a comprehensible, yet still foreign-sounding
English phrase.
Another of Hemingways preferred ways of conveying Italian speech is
to translate niente, the Italian word for nothing. After Rinaldi gives Frederic
coffee beans to chew for clearing up his boozy breath before meeting Catherine Barkley, Frederic thanks him, and Rinaldis response is, Nothing, baby.
Nothing (41). Nothing seems an odd word choice, but Rinaldi has only
used niente, an informal version of youre welcome, short for non niente
or di niente.
Nothing happens again later, when the priest visits Frederic in the
hospital, and Frederic thanks him for bringing gifts. Like Rinaldi, the priest
replies, Nothing (73). The more natural rendering of casual speech would
be Dont mention it or even Its nothing, but the single word nothing is
enough to convey the Italianness of the entire dialogue. Hemingway uses a
literal translation for niente, even though its meaning does not transfer into
English with perfect fluidity. In fact, he translates niente precisely because it

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does not transfer with perfect fluidity. Readers intuit that because the presentation is a bit awry, the word nothing signifies Italian speech.
The Italian words for thank you, as well as youre welcome are grist
for Hemingways strategy. In A Farewell to Arms, the expression many thanks
occurs four times, unconventional wording for conversational English, but a
literal translation of tante grazie, the commonest of Italian phrases. Frederic
himself uses the phrase three times: he thanks the stretcher-bearers who have
carried him to the hospital (83); the doctors who evaluate his condition (97);
and the silhouette-cutter who gives him a complimentary cutout (135). The
fourth occurrence is spoken by the waiter who holds an umbrella over Frederic and Catherine and ushers them into a waiting carriage. After Frederic
tips him, the waiter says, Many thanks. Pleasant journey (157). These stilted
two-word phrases are unremarkable if spoken in Italian: Tante grazie. Buon
viaggio. Hemingway translates them directly into English to give readers the
sense and rhythm of the language in which the action occurs, rather than the
easier-to-read Thank you very much. Have a nice trip, as a polite American
waiter would say.6 Hemingways word choice here recalls Che Ti Dice La
Patria? when non capiscoItalian for I dont understandis presented
both as Dont understand and No understand (CSS 226, 227). In A Farewell to Arms, Rinaldiearlier seen studying a book of English grammaris
confused by a phrase spoken in English and tells Frederic, No understand
(20). The two-word phrase imparts the rhythm of foreignness, and with it,
verisimilitude in the novel.
In Che Ti Dice La Patria? the narrator gives an impromptu lecture on
the different ways to thank someone in Italian. After he gives a young Italian
man a free ride, the narrator observes the new generations decaying civility
by noting that the young man merely says thanks, and not thank you, or
thank you very much, or thank you a thousand times, all of which you formerly said in Italy to a man when he handed you a time-table or explained
about a direction. The young man uttered the lowest form of the word thanks
(CSS 225).7 The narrator refers to the subtle distinctions among grazie, ti
ringrazio, tante grazie, and grazie mille. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic
never delineates the subtleties of the various gradations of thank you, but
instead four times reproduces tante grazie as many thanks.
Just as A Farewell to Arms includes designated correspondents for thank
you and youre welcome, so it does for please, recalling Peduzzis use of
for a favor in Out of Season. In A Farewell to Arms, per piacere is translated literally as for pleasure when Frederic wants to pay the silhouettecutter, saying: Please. I brought out some coppers. For pleasure (135). Here
Frederic uses two forms of the Italian word for please. His first please is
the equivalent of the standard per favore, while the second is a literal translation of per piacere.

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Although for pleasure appears in A Farewell to Arms, the novel never

features the literal translation for a favor to represent the Italian per favore,
as in Out of Season.8 Frederic does not explicate the difference between
the two pleases in A Farewell to Arms as thank yous are explained in Che
Ti Dice La Patria? Colonel Cantwell, however, later expounds on the nuances of per piacere in Across the River and into the Trees, magnanimously
explaining to Renatawho is Italian, it must be notedthe proper way to
say please in Italian: Per piacere. It means for pleasure. I wish we always
talked Italian (195).
Robert W. Lewis points to another moment in A Farewell to Arms where
Hemingways technique of literal translation serves the narrative. Gino, who
heads the ambulance unit during Frederics absence, updates Frederic on the
war effort, and reports that there are food shortages because [t]he dogfish are
selling it somewhere else (184). In English, dogfish refers to small sharks,
as does its Italian counterpart, pescecani. However, according to the Bantam
New College Italian-English Dictionary, pescecani is also Italian slang for war
profiteers, the meaning Gino intends. According to Lewis, Even if readers
do not know the Italian reference, dogfish still serves to suggest not only
Frederics fluency but his awareness of the metaphoric basis of language and
of the difference between what seems to be and what actually is (147). Readers will at least recognize dogfish as a putdown for a scoundrel, and not as an
actual reference to the animal.9
Indeed, to extend Lewiss observation, whenever readers encounter a
word or phrase that seems somewhat inappropriate, they can feel confident
that this break in fluency is Hemingways method of representing the Italian
language that Frederic encounters on a daily basis. For instance, when Frederic is about to be sent to Milan at the end of Book One, Rinaldi says Many
things twice (77). This is a literal translation of tante cose, an Italian expression roughly equivalent to All the best in English. Tante means many
and cose means things. Had Hemingway written all the best, comprehension would have been seamless, but the essence of Rinaldis Italian speech
would have been lost in translation. By literally translating words and phrases,
Hemingway places the reader at the crossroads of fluency and foreignness,
where Frederic Henry himself is situated.
On other occasions in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway lapses in his careful approach to negotiating the two languages. Before the retreat at Caporetto,
Frederic and his fellow soldiers speak in a kind of easy slang that is altogether
inconsistent with the dialogue in the rest of the novel. Frederic uses monkey
suit to refer to a mechanics outfit; Bonello declares that he wants to use the
same bed in which the major corks off; Piani refers to the major as fish-face;
and one of the soldiers uses the putdown slackers (190, 192). Although the gist
of these phrases can certainly be conveyed by Italian soldiers, the rhythm and

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diction of Italian speech have been replaced by dialogue that seems distinctly
American. Frederic instructs his soldiers with another phraseIts time to
roll (192)that seems even more American now than it did during World
War I. By using this untranslatable Americanism, Hemingway departs from
his technique of rendering Italian dialogue in English. It would be impossible
for Frederic to use this wording and still be understood by his fellow soldiers.10
Fernanda Pivanos translation of A Farewell to Armsthe accepted standard
for five decades11uses ora di andare (201), or, Its time to go. Pivanos
Frederic Henry speaks differently from Hemingways Frederic Henry, and in
this case the translator had no choice. Hemingway has failed to maintain the
slightly formal pitch of Frederics Italian speech. After the soldiers breakfast
in a farmhouse during the retreat, Frederic almost repeats himself, saying this
time, Well roll (202). Once more, Pivanos attempt cannot help but be inadequate: Andiamo (211), simply, Lets go. For the second time, the accepted
Italian translation renders the particularly American military expression to
roll as the more mundane to go.
This ambiguity can be underscored with a quotation from Frederics
fellow driver Bonello, who says Lets go (214), which Pivano translates
properly as Andiamo (224). Using Andiamo for both Lets go and Well
roll, Pivano cannot convey the colloquial or maintain the different shades
of formality characterizing Frederics speech. Therefore, while Hemingway
intends Frederics exhortation to be expressed in the type of military slang
common to ambulance drivers and soldiers everywhere, the writers linguistic
decision only leads to confusion, as if Frederic speaks this phrase in English
by instinct, or mutters it to himself, rather than giving orders to his troops
in Italian. The resulting vagueness could even lead a reader to conclude that
Frederic had already taught his fellow soldiers this Americanismif not, he
would never speak in this manner.
Hemingway makes a similar misstep when the bartender in Milan offers
Frederic a grappa on me (237), slang with no natural correlative in Italian.
As with well roll, the use of an American colloquialism like on me gives
the reader pause, and he or she may double-check to make sure that the Milanese bartender is speaking Italian, and not conversing in English for Frederics benefit. An Italian would only say that a grappa was on him if he was
balancing the bottle on his head, or had spilled some on his lap. Predictably,
Pivanos translation renders on me into Italian without the casual power of
the original; in her edition, the bartender says, offro io (247), which conveys
his offer to pay for the drink, but without the colloquial tone Hemingway intends. Had Hemingway adhered to his established technique, the bartenders
speech would read, I offer, replicating the Italian in a manner more consistent with the literal translation found in the rest of the novel.

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Towards the end of the novel, when Frederic must escape Italy, he meets
Ralph Simmons again. Here, the two English-speakers who have been most
maligned for their imperfect Italian can at last speak their native language
without fear of reprisal. Their conversation is notable for its relaxed language,
even during the most urgent of situations. Frederic visits Simmons at the
Porta Magenta in Milan, and appeals for help in the most American of ways:
Im in a jam, Sim. Simmons empathizes with Frederic: So am I . . . Im
always in a jam (241). Idiomatic phrases like in a jam clearly demarcate
English speech. For this reason, expressions like on me and lets rollused
when Frederic is presumably speaking Italianconfound the execution of
Hemingways technique.
The most vivid way to understand how the Italian language is represented in the dialogue of A Farewell to Arms is to examine it in opposition to
the way English is conveyed. When conversations take place in English, they
differ noticeably from the dialogues between Frederic and any Italian speaker.
In an early scene, Frederic picks up a straggling, struggling soldier, referred
to as the hernia man. Their conversation initially occurs in the Italian we
have come to expect from the military scenes, but the soldier, who has spent
time in Pittsburgh, recognizes from Frederics accent that he is not an Italian.
The soldier asks him, You speak English? and their conversation descends
into rough, colloquial English. Frederic protests, Dont I talk Italian good
enough? The soldier responds, I knew you was an American all right. He
later asks, Jesus Christ, aint this a goddam war? (35). The coarseness of their
English is the polar opposite of the correctness of the Italian with which they
began their conversation. Not only does the language change, but the tone of
the conversation moves from detachment to familiarity. The hernia man first
calls Frederic Tenente (34) and then lootenant (35).
After Frederic is wounded, a British driver assists him, and his brief
monologue serves as the Rosetta Stone of Hemingways technique of presenting the Italian language in A Farewell to Arms:
Well be most careful of them, he straightened up. This chap
of yours was very anxious for me to see you. He patted Gordini on
the shoulder. Gordini winced and smiled. The Englishman broke
into voluble and perfect Italian. Now everything is arranged.
Ive seen your Tenente. We will take over the two cars. You wont
worry now. He broke off, I must do something about getting you
out of here. Ill see the medical wallahs. Well take you back with
us. (58)

The British driver weaves between English and Italian, both of which are
clearly marked in the narrative. Addressing Frederic in English, he uses

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the British-flavored phrase most careful12 and the word chap, made
famous by Hemingways most notorious Brit, Brett Ashley from The Sun
Also Rises. The Englishman then breaks into Italian for four sentences as he
speaks to Gordini, and then switches back to English again as he promises
to get Frederic out of here. In Italian, the driver uses the formulation we
will; in English he twice uses the less formal contraction well. His second speech in English is also distinguished by British slang, this time the
Anglo-Indian word wallah. The writing decisions are small in scope, but
Hemingway manipulates such minute details to emphasize the dynamic
between languages, just as he will do later in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The dialectic between English and Italian continues in the same scene,
as the Englishman carries the wounded Frederic to the ambulance.
Here is the American Tenente, he said in Italian.

And then later:

Come, come, he said, Dont be a bloody hero. Then in Italian:
Lift him very carefully about the legs. His legs are very painful.
(58)

The passage indicates which language the driver is speaking, even though
word choice makes it self-evident. When the Englishman uses basic, correct speech, he is speaking Italian to Italians. The adjective bloody, on
the other hand, is spoken in English to Frederic. He speaks perfect Italian, but his perfection, ironically, conveys foreignness and not fluency. It
is through the casual imperfection, as with the soldier with the hernia,
that fluency in vernacular speech is represented. As he loads Frederic into
the ambulance, the English driver tells him, I hope youll be comfy (61).
Here the narrative does not explicitly indicate which language the driver
is speaking, but we can be absolutely certain that he is speaking colloquial
Englishcomfyto Frederic.
The Italian officer Ettore Moretti acts as an important contrast to characters who can never completely bridge the linguistic gap. Like Frederic, Ettore was raised in Americaa wop from Frisco (120)but unlike Frederic, he speaks flawless Italian, without the accent that gets Ralph Simmons
heckled and nearly gets Frederic Henry killed. It is Ettore who relentlessly
mocksor, true to his name, hectors13the non-Italian Simmons14 for his
efforts to pass as an Italian opera singer, and it is Ettore who taunts Frederic:
You cant be a captain, because you dont know the Italian language well
enough . . . You can talk but you cant read and write well enough (122). Ettore himself acknowledges that his bilingualism and not his brilliance has put

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him on the fast track for promotion, while the others are destined by their
lack of facility in Italian to be subject to ridicule (in Simmonss case) and danger (in Frederics case). As Robert W. Lewis observes, Ettores power derives
directly from his fluency in both languages (131). Ettore has the same power
over Frederic that Frederic has over Catherine. Ettore flaunts his bilingualism, even audaciously venturing a 1920s American catchphrase: Dont take
any bad nickels (124).
Sheldon Norman Grebstein notes that Hemingways most extensive experiment in dialogue . . . is the transliteration of Spanish into English in For
Whom the Bell Tolls, which Grebstein claims, is Hemingways own innovation and succeeds because the effects echo the sound of a foreign language
(125). Joseph Warren Beach, also discussing For Whom the Bell Tolls, writes
that Nearly all the dialogue is supposed to be talk in Spanish rendered in
English . . . to suggest throughout the flavor of the native idiom. To Beach,
the effect is charming, picturesque, and dramatic (84). The Spanish novelist
Arturo Barea offers an opposing view, charging that in attempting to render
the speech of Castilian peasants, Hemingway invents an artificial and pompous English which contains many un-English words and constructions, most
of which cannot be admitted as translations of the original Spanish (209).
Gilbert Highet mocks the style of For Whom the Bell Tolls in a satirical sendup: It is a kind of Spanish. It is a bloody kind of unspeakable Spanish . . . We
got to turn the whole unspeakable Spanish colloquial speech into a far more
unspeakable American language. We got to write pidgin Spanish and pidgin
American so the customers will understand every minute it is Spanish (19).
Other critics have commented on Hemingways use of the archaic pronouns thee and thou and thy in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Carlos Baker
describes this as intentionally heightened language (248), intended to reproduce the tone of an Elizabethan epic. For Azevedo, the pronouns suggest
an old-fashioned poetic usage or the archaic diction of the King James Bible
(33). Such discussion relates to Hemingways use of Italian in A Farewell to
Arms, where this bold technique appears in an inconspicuous, nascent stage.
While For Whom the Bell Tolls uses thee and thou and thy frequently, in A
Farewell to Arms thou and thy are never used, but thee appears twice.
In the first instance of thee, Frederic has just finished a courteous conversation with a silhouette-cutter, who has given Frederic a portrait. The old
man refuses the money Frederic offers, and then says, Until I see thee (135).
Here, the intent is to show the respect of the silhouette-cutter towards Frederic through formal address, which in Italian is the Lei form, the so-called
second person formal; it is not a random elevation into Biblical gravitas or
Elizabethan tragedy. When Frederic says goodbye to Catherine before returning to the front, he refuses the help of a porter, saying, Thanks. I dont
need thee (157). Although a native Italian would not customarily use formal

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address to a porter, here thee signals that Frederic is addressing the porter
with careful politeness.
The two instances of thee in A Farewell to Arms signify the layers of etiquette built into the Italian language, as outlined so painstakingly by the narrator of Che Ti Dice La Patria? In fact, readers are alerted to this concern
early in the novel with a subtle gesture. When Frederic calls on Catherine
Barkley and the head nurse tells him she is not there, she concludes their brief
chat with A rivederci, the typical way to say so long. Frederic, on the other
hand, says goodbye with a formal flourish, A rivederla (23), the la denoting
formal address.
No discussion of the Italian in A Farewell to Arms should ignore the
many, usually minor technical errors Hemingway makes with the language,
especially in spelling and capitalization. A Farewell to Arms does not stand
alone as a Hemingway text with errors. James Hinkle has written on Hemingways imperfect use of foreign languages in The Sun Also Rises; Edward Fenimore discussed Hemingways Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Allen
Josephs later savaged the use of language in that novel, labeling Hemingways
carelessness with the language as a kind of chauvinism (217). In A Farewell
to Arms, Hemingways own mistakes mirror Ettores observation to Frederic;
perhaps he can speak Italian, but he does not read or write it well enough.
As may be expected when someone learns the language through conversation as opposed to formal study in a classroom, Hemingways Italian is often
phonetically recognizable, but orthographically incorrect. Therefore, while
Hemingway may have believed that he properly represented his protagonists
knowledge of Italian, he overestimated his ability to render the language correctly in print.
Hemingway makes himself understood, but is less than fluent, and
makes many mistakes that Frederic Henry would not make. Hemingways
technique is not harmed by the gaffes, nor is the novel, yet these mistakes are
obviously unintentional, and should be corrected as if they were unintentional
misspellings or punctuation errors in English. Hemingways spelling even in
English was erratic; it is inexcusable that no one at Scribners corrected these
simple errors. The appendix at the end of this article suggests a list of errors
in Italian to be corrected in future editions. Because elsewhere in A Farewell
to Arms Hemingway was obsessively accurate in matters of military history,
geography, and even meteorology, and was, for the most part, judicious in
rendering Italian speech in English, it is a shame to leave these mistakes, as
if even his guesses at spelling foreign words were in some way sacrosanct and
must never be altered.
The intent in closing with a list of errors in Italian is not to throw
the benches at Hemingway. The criticism (directed more to Scribners than
to Hemingway himself ) is a necessary thread in the overall investigation of

You Dont Know the Italian Language Well Enough

181

Hemingways approach to the bilingualism in his Italian fiction. A Farewell

to Arms marks the extension of Hemingways previous experimentation with
representing Italian speech, the subtle technique of literal translation seen in
the short stories Out of Season and Che Ti Dice La Patria? as well as in
its improbable debut, the 1918 letter home from Milan. His use of Italian in
A Farewell to Arms also foreshadows his later, grander efforts with Spanish in
For Whom the Bell Tolls. For some, parsing out minuscule linguistic nuances
may seem a trivial approach to a novel concerned with life and death, God,
catastrophe, and doomed love. But this is precisely the point. Hemingway
saw fit to focus intently on the smallest particles of language, even while
chronicling the grand sweep of love and death, and to understand his method
reveals much to us about both the writer and his great novel.

No t e s
1. These two letters are reprinted in full in Marcelline Hemingway Sanfords
At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence Between Marcelline and Ernest
Hemingway (282283; 287289). However, because there are editorial changes in
the published letters, I have used my own transcriptions from the manuscripts.
2. Robert E. Gajdusek makes a similar point about Hemingways use of that
makes nothing to conjure up the German language in the short story An Alpine
Idyll: the awkward that makes nothing readily suggests the probable Machs
nichts or Das macht nichts of the actual exchange (120).
3. See The Sun Also Rises, in which Brett wants to listen to Jakes confession
in a Pamplona church, but Jake tells her that it would be in a language she did not
know (154).
4. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, El Sordos speech is similarly appraised: Does
he talk that way to every one? Robert Jordan thought. Or is that his idea of how to
make foreigners understand? (146); and, So he does only speak that pidgin Spanish
for foreigners, Robert Jordan thought (147). Likewise, in A Clean Well-Lighted
Place, the narrator refers to that omission of syntax stupid people employ when
talking to drunken people or foreigners (CSS 290).
5. In Hemingways short story, In Another Country, the protagonist is
exhorted to Speak grammatically! and responds with the future tense, I will go
to the States (CSS 209). In that same story the protagonist claims that Italian is an
easy language, and the major asks him, Why, then, do you not take up the use of
grammar? (208).
6. In the manuscript, Hemingways original rendering of buon viaggio is
not Pleasant journey but another intentionally awkward two-word phrase: Good
traveling (JFK 64).
7. See also Hemingways short story, A Natural History of the Dead, in
which an Italian doctor says, Thank you very much . . . Thank you a thousand
times (CSS 340).
8. For Whom the Bell Tolls features the literal translation of the Spanish por
favor, spoken by the dying Fernando (Leave me now please, for a favor [441]), and
by the dying Robert Jordan to Maria (Therefore go for a favor [463]).

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Mark Cirino

9. The notion of the pescecani takes on thematic importance in Across the

River and into the Trees. Colonel Cantwell and the headwaiter at the Gritti, the Gran
Maestro, create the Order of the Brusadelli in their shared true, good hatred of all
those who profited by war (61), or the Milan profiteers (46). Cantwell extends the
label of pescecani to novelists who write to profit quickly from the war they never
fought in (129). In Hemingways 1948 introduction to the illustrated version of A
Farewell to Arms, he writes, I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a
war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited
representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it (x). See also
Shakespeares 1 Henry VI, where Lord Talbot says, Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or
dogfish (I.iv.112).
10. In Across the River and into the Trees, Colonel Cantwell also orders his
chauffeur Jackson with the phrase Lets roll (36). However, he is speaking
English.
11. In 1945, Jandi Sapi published the first translation of A Farewell to Arms
into Italian under the title Un addio alle armi, translated by Bruno Fonzi. In 1946,
Mondadori published an illustrated edition, Addio alle armi, with a new translation
by Giansiro Ferrata, Puccio Russo, and Dante Isella. For the purposes of this paper,
discussion will be limited to Fernanda Pivanos popular 1949 translation.
12. Hemingway underlined most in the manuscript, suggesting the way he
heard the typically British emphasis on this word (JFK 64).
13. In Across the River and into the Trees, a Venetian waiter also named Ettore
has a love of joking and fundamental and abiding disrespect (85) and loves to
joke (93).
14. Ettore makes reference to Simmons returning to America to brag of his
singing success, and the vice-consul jokes that the American army will need to
protect him when he sings in the Scala, but from his speech Simmons seems British.
He asks Frederic, How do you happen to be away from the bloody front? (241), and
then calls Frederic my dear Henry (241), and my dear fellow six times (242).

Wor k s Ci t e d
Azevedo, Milton M. Shadows of a Literary Dialect: For Whom the Bell Tolls in Five Romance
Languages. The Hemingway Review. 20.1 (Fall 2000): 3048.
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. 1972. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990.
Barea, Arturo. Not Spain But Hemingway. In Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos
Baker. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.
Beach, Joseph Warren. Style in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four
Major Novels. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribners, 1962.
Fenimore, Edward. English and Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls. ELH 10.1 (March
1943): 7386.
Gajdusek, Robert E. Hemingway in His Own Country. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2002.
Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingways Craft. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1973.
Griffin, Peter. Along With Youth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Hemingway, Ernest. Across the River and into the Trees. 1950. New York: Scribners, 1996.
. Un addio alle armi. Trans. Bruno Fonzi. Milan: Jandi Sapi, 1945.

You Dont Know the Italian Language Well Enough

183

. Addio alle armi. Trans. Giansiro Ferrata, Puccio Russo, Dante Isella. Milan:
Mondadori, 1946.
. Addio alle armi. Trans. Fernanda Pivano. 1949. Milan: Mondadori, 2002.
. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribners, 2003.
. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 19171961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York:
Scribners, 1981.
. Letters to Marcelline Hemingway. 8 August 1918 and 21 September 1918.
Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
. Introduction. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribners, 1948.
. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner, 1995.
. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. New York: Scribner, 1995.
. Manuscript of A Farewell to Arms. Folder #64. Hemingway Collection. John F.
Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Hemingway, Marcelline. At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence Between Ernest
and Marcelline Hemingway. Ed. John Sanford. Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press,
1999.
Highet, Gilbert. Thou Tellest Me, Comrade. Studies in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ed.
Sheldon Norman Grebstein. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1971.
Hinkle, James. Dear Mr. ScribnerAbout the Published Text of The Sun Also Rises. The
Hemingway Review 6.1 (Fall 1986): 4364.
Josephs, Allen. Hemingways Poor Spanish: Chauvinism and Loss of Credibility in For
Whom the Bell Tolls. In Hemingway: A Revaluation. Ed. Donald R. Noble. Troy, NY:
Whitston, 1983 : 205223.
Lewis, Robert W. A Farewell to Arms: The War of Words. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Moses, Carole. Language as Theme in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Fitzgerald/Hemingway
Annual, 1978: 215223.
Oldsey, Bernard. Hemingways Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms. University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania St. University Press, 1979.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingways First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1976.
Smith, Paul. A Readers Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: GK Hall,
1989.

A ppe n di x of Er ror s in Ita l i a n a n d

P rop ose d C or r e c t ions
Page Number
9
9
9
11 et passim
33
36
38 et passim
40
55

Hemingways Spelling
soto-tenente (2x)
tenentecolonello
soto-colonello
ciaou (9x)
smistimento
Emmanuele
capri bianca (8x)
Fillipo (2x)
mama mia (8x)

Proposed Change
sottotenente
tenente colonnello
sottocolonnello
ciao
smistamento
Emanuele
Capri bianco
Filippo
mamma mia

184
55
55
73
77
87
112
112
112
120
135
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Mark Cirino

Dio te salve (2x)

porta feriti (2x)
Gran Sasso DItalia
riparto
chianti (4x)
galleria (7x)
fresa (2x)
barbera (4x)
Edouardo
Corriere Della Sera
A basso gli ufficiali

Dio ti salvi
portaferiti
Gran Sasso dItalia
reparto
Chianti
Galleria
Freisa
Barbera
Edoardo
Corriere della Sera
Abbasso gli ufficiali

T revor D odman

Going All to Pieces:

A Farewell to Arms as Trauma Narrative
Bullet wounds do not cause severe bleeding unless they happen to injure
some large trunk or smash one of the larger bones. Wounds caused by
fragments of shells or bombs tear larger holes in the skin and lacerate the
muscles and are, therefore, more often the cause of serious bleeding.
Injuries and Diseases of War (15)

n the final chapter of A Farewell to Arms, the narrator and main character,
Frederic Henry, describes the protracted labor of his partner, Catherine Barkley. When the attending physician recommends a cesarian section, Frederic
anxiously inquires about the dangers associated with the procedure. Assuring him that the risks should not exceed those associated with an ordinary
delivery, the doctor responds to Frederics question regarding the potential
aftereffects of the operation: There are none. There is only the scar (321).
Although this reply suggests that what remains will be of no lingering concern, A Farewell to Arms nonetheless testifies to the persistence of wounds,
both visible and invisible. Frederics particular narration of the events and
experiences that mark his wartime years must be understood in such terms,
for his entire narrativeno ordinary deliveryinscribes a continued
struggle with the debilitating aftereffects associated with shell shock. He
suffers from the compulsion to remember and retell his traumatic past from
Twentieth Century Literature, Volume 52, Number 3 (Fall 2006): pp. 249274. Copyright
2006 Hofstra University.

185

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the standpoint of a survivor both unable and perhaps unwilling to put that
very past into words; the novel stands as a record of his narrative collision
with the violence of trauma.1
Frederics troubled recollections find expression in apparently embodied
and disembodied ways: as pain that registers at the level of the body, breaking
apart the perceived unity of the physical self in the presence of terrific bodily
suffering; and as trauma that registers at the level of consciousness, breaking
down time, language, and the perceived unity of the subjective self in the face
of incomprehensible violence. However, in staging an ongoing dialogue between inside and outside, A Farewell to Arms also challenges us to reconsider
the mind/body dualism that keeps the wounds of the body separate from the
wounds of the mind. For Frederics narrationof his body, his memory, his
woundsdestabilizes such distinctions in an effort to hold together a broken
past that remains, in the present, a nexus of uncertainty and contestation. In
accord with Tim Armstrongs emphasis on the interpenetration of machine
and human in the modernist period, and with his identification of the prosthetic thinking (3) involved in the repair and augmentation of bodies in the
face of radical disruption in warfare, Frederics narration enacts a kind of
prosthetic thinking: he repairs and augments his past as a countermeasure for
the pain and trauma that plague him still.2
Looking back on events, reconstructing his memories, Frederic reveals a
desire for a whole and perfect retelling of the past; his narration functions as
a prosthesis meant to stave off a sense of the self as a disarticulated scar. His
embodied subjectivity, like the wounds he suffers to represent, calls out for
prosthetic completion. But as Elaine Scarry notes, what is remembered in
the body is well remembered (112), and Frederics narrative prosthesis cannot hold the wound closed. His traumatic memories bleed into and disrupt
his present; his narration operates both as scar and wound, as tissue stitched
together and lacerated apart. Though his prosthetic version of events insists
on the potential for a separate peace (243), Frederics telling of his past instead goes all to pieces (322) in the enduring presence of pain and trauma
too well remembered to be left behind.
For years, analysts of the novel understood that Hemingway himself
was doing the rememberingthe author recalling his Great War experiences
through his cipher, Frederic Henry.3 While it seems to me simply impossible
to imagine anyones being wounded in war and not having it affect his or her
writing of a novel about war memories and characters who are wounded, I am
not principally interested in either the text or the trauma of Hemingways life
but rather in the text of his narrators trauma. For Frederics narrative, I contend, unfolds in keeping with the work of prominent trauma theorists such
as Dominick LaCapra, who describes trauma as a disruptive experience that
disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence; it has belated effects that

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187

are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered (41).4 In
Frederics case, the disarticulation of the self occurs in a narrative that shifts
unpredictably between past and present, between the time of the action and
the time of the telling. To reconstruct the past he must confront the holes
in his subjective experience of the war, despite the fact that he might not have
full mastery over the memories.
Although accounts of the novel often emphasize the centrality of
memory in analyzing Frederics narration, critics have not fully pursued the
implications of the fact that the narrative consciousness in charge of these
memories is one that has been traumatized.5 Diane Price Herndl touches
on the novels traumatic terrain, briefly discussing Frederic in the context
of shell shock before going on to argue that his illness is masculinity as
it was presented to the World War I soldier (39). While Herndl assesses
the silencing of Frederic in terms of sociocultural technologies of the male
self, I find in the novels enforced silences the disruptive workings of traumatic memories aggressively imposing themselves on the survivor.6 Indeed,
Frederics particular narrative survival demands extra attention in light of
the key critical tendency to focus on the extent to which Frederic changes
over the course of the novel. According to James Phelan, Frederic begins the
novel as a naive narrator but also as a character who does not understand the
war or the larger destruction of the world (56); in Michael Reynoldss view,
Frederic is a changed man (Doctors 119) after his wounding. Phelan and
Reynolds read in the novel a diminishing ironic gap between the time of the
action and the time of the telling, and a corresponding closing of moral distance between Frederic the character and Frederic the narrator. In contrast, I
suggest that A Farewell to Arms warrants consideration as a trauma narrative
that enacts the collapsing of such distinctions.7 From the very first page of
the novel Frederic suffers from shell shock; his voice is always already the
voice of a traumatized survivor of grievous wounds and losses. A changed
man from the outset, his narrative reveals the continued and unchanging
hold that his painful past has on his present. My argument, in short, rests
on the belief that all of A Farewell to Arms must be considered in terms of
traumatic aftereffects.
Horrified participant and helpless witness, Frederic, along with his traumatic exposure to dismemberment, killing, and death comes to us via the
mediation of his own narration. As Joanna Bourke reminds us,
there is no experience independent of the ordering mechanisms
of grammar, plot, and genre, and this is never more the case than
when attempting to speak the ultimate transgressionkilling
another human being. (358)

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The heuristic imperatives built into speaking about trauma add social
dimensions to subjective and interior processes. In Kirby Farrells terms,
trauma remains a psychocultural matter, an injury that demands to be
interpreted and, if possible, integrated into character (7). Frederics narrative task, then, is always double: he must tell the story of his shell-shocked
past, integrate it into his character, while at the same time confronting the
shell shock in his present as it transgresses on his capacity to tell. The retrospective organization of his traumatic experiences reflects the simultaneity
of his now and then, or as James Young puts matters, the
survivors memory includes both experiences of history and of
memory, the ways memory has already become part of personal
history, the ways misapprehension of events and the silences that
come with incomprehension were parts of events as they unfolded
then and part of memory as it unfolds now. (280)

Frederics past intrudes on his present, and his interpretation of his injury takes shape in his prosthetic reconstitution of painful and traumatic events
and experiences.8 Bodies bleed in this novel, at times uncontrollably, and
Frederics narrative likewise suffers at times from troubling and uncontrollable outflow. Frederics prosthetic interventions, his efforts at control, underscore collapsing distinctions between the artificial and the natural, between
the mind and the body, and between the past and the present. Prosthetics
challenges such distinctions by explicitly drawing our attention to relations of
difference. For David Wills, prosthetic relations not only complicate the perceived relation of animate and inanimate but also, at the same time, insist on
the measured distance between such domains. The prosthetic emerges in the
articulation of two heterogeneities (30) but also in the very gap that opens
up between a truncated limb and its mechanical extension. As Wills writes:
no amputation is performed without the forethought of a workable
prosthesis; the knife doesnt strike indiscriminately but is guided
by the range of prostheses that wait, parasitic, for a suitable host.
In this respect the prosthetic possibility determines the shape of
the human, the artificial determines the form of the natural. (29)

In the context of A Farewell to Arms, Frederic jokes with his doctors about
his desire to have his knee cut off, so that he can wear a hook on it (97).
While Frederics sarcasm here comments on the incompetence of these particular doctors, his narration itself takes shape as a workable prosthesis,
a hook worn in the place of a lost limb, in spite ofrather than as a result
ofthe fact that his pain, his wounding, his losses, his trauma do strike

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189

indiscriminately. That is, his narration must confront a traumatic rupturing

of the self that cannot be prepared for ahead of time.
In the case of his own wounding, Frederic describes the experience of being hit with shell fragments in a prominent stream-of-consciousness passage:
I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself
rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time
bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I
was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.
Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I
breathed and I was back. (54)

Here Frederic describes a feeling of breaching as he rushes out of himself,

his as-yet unnamed, unarticulated wounds producing an exchange across the
membrane of the self. His perceptions of his wounding experience emphasize
the passivity and helplessness of his situation: he cant control his breathing,
he convulses outward and then floats inward at the behest of unknown and
unalterable forces; he mistakes the experience as a whole for the certainty of
death only to make a gentle return to the uncertainties of life.9
Testifying to the profound destabilizations that accompany the passive
witnessing of the bodys disruption, Frederic registers here a paradoxical and
confusing disarticulation of the self into selves: I felt myself rush bodily out
of myself. . . . I felt myself slide back. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van
der Hart describe the feeling of uncoupling that Frederic experiences here:
Many trauma survivors report that they automatically are removed from the
scene; they look at it from a distance or disappear altogether, leaving other
parts of their personality to suffer and store the overwhelming experience
(168). Floating outward, Frederic experiences his wounding at a remove: he
rushes out of his wounded body and then glides back into its consolidating
confines. Importantly, he also looks at it from a distance to the extent that
his version of the wounding comes at a considerable temporal remove. His
watching of the events takes shape in his narration of them, and his return
therefore not only describes the recoupling of self and body in the time of
the action but also functions as a simultaneous reexperiencing at the time of
the telling. Frederics narration not only describes a past dissociative event
but becomes in itself, in its very telling, a terribly present dissociative event.10
Experienced in the moment of the explosion as a terrifying shuttling back
and forth across breached boundaries, his wounding offers, in its recounting,
a record of an uncontrollable reexperiencing of the eventsa collapsing of
distance between past and present. Thus, in the same way that he at once feels
both inside of and outside of his self, he feels himself slide back to the moment of his wounding in the moment of his telling.

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Trevor Dodman

While the content of such a passage certainly marks his overt efforts to
describe in detail the traumatic events suffered, the desperate tone hints at
the frustration Frederic feels as he attempts to describe what he cannot forget
but cannot manage to put into words. In fact, he quickly resorts to shocking
understatement to try to relate events: I knew that I was hit and leaned over
and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasnt there. My hand went in and
my knee was down on my shin (55). The effect is jarring as the vague out
and out and out crashes into the specific horror of my knee was down on
my shin. Frederics disembodied sense of floating, his peaceful calm, his relief
as he feels himself return to his bodyI was backall of these experiences
explode apart with the sudden understanding that the perceived integrity of
his body has been radically disrupted. The momentary return to wholeness he
narrates is important, for it reveals prosthetic thinking that seeks to keep the
body together; however, this unity lasts but a short interval before being shattered by the insistence of the bodys well-remembered wounds.
Reconstructing the scene of his own reconstruction, Frederic again
grapples with dissociative aftereffects. Though the medical sergeant who
wraps up his damaged legs notes that there was so much dirt blown into the
wound that there had not been much hemorrhage (57), Frederics condition
still demands immediate intervention in a battlefield dressing station. While
the doctor probes for shell fragments in his legs and wraps up Frederics
fractured skull, Frederic lies helpless and in pain on the hard and slippery
operating table, surrounded by chemical smells and the sweet smell of blood
(59). Frederic recalls a conversation and operation occurring simultaneously:
The medical captain, What hit you?
Me, with eyes shut, A trench mortar shell.
The captain, doing things that hurt sharply and severing
tissueAre you sure?
Metrying to lie still and feeling my stomach flutter when the
flesh was cut, I think so.
Captain doctor(interested in something he was finding),
Fragments of enemy trench-mortar shell. Now Ill probe for
some of this if you like but its not necessary. Ill paint all of this
andDoes that sting? Good, thats nothing to how it will feel
later. The pain hasnt started yet. (59)

The simultaneity of probing and talking about it provides an analogue for

the dissociative elements governing a recollection that operates as both a
retelling and a reliving of a painful reality. Like the doctor who insists
that probing the wound is not necessary but does so anyway, Frederics
restaging here suggests that his probing of the past simply cannot be

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191

avoided, no matter how sharply it hurts. Though he tries to lie still, tries
to establish a protective prosthetic distance between a Me who experiences and an I who remembers, these self-articulations bleed together in
the face of the extremities involved. The pain that arises on the operating
table with the probing of a wound brings to Frederic the pain experienced
in the moment of his wounding: the Me on the table shoots out and
out and out and back into the I of the explosion. Likewise, a dynamic
of deferred immediacy marks Frederics narration of the operation: the
I looking back at the Me on the table brings a chronic condition into
contact with its acute origins.
Despite a subsequent series of operations and other treatments, all designed to allow for his return to the front, Frederics knee does not make a
full recovery. Rinaldi runs his finger along the scar and painfully tests the
range of motion: Its a crime to send you back. They ought to get complete
articulation (166). Just as the exigencies of the war call for Frederics return
to duty with a still-damaged knee, so too does his narration compulsively
return to the operations involved with a partially articulated sense of the past.
Well aware that in many respects the pain hasnt started yet, his recollection
of various procedures consistently reveals the prosthetic thinking at work in
their management. At one point, for instance, Frederics wounded legs must
be X-rayed, a process arranged by holding up the shoulders, that the patient
should see personally some of the larger foreign bodies through the machine
(94). Although Frederic himself earlier refers to these items as old screws
and bedsprings and things (85), the doctor attending to his X-rays has a
decidedly more serious opinion of the matter: He declared that the foreign
bodies were ugly, nasty, brutal. The Austrians were sons of bitches (94).
Frederic confronts here, at a remove and via the eyes of a machine, his
own disrupted, penetrated bodya body invaded by metal Austrians out on
maneuver quite literally inside enemy territory. Thus, while he must confront
the terrible bodily consequences of modern warfare, he also faces a decidedly
modern paradox, as his own experience of bodily integritydisrupted both
by the metal fragments and the X-rays that locate themdepends on continued technological intervention. Frederics survival depends on seeing the
foreign bodies through the machine, a move that places his felt experience
of his woundings painful reality in a subsidiary relation to that of a machineproduced vision of the causes of the wounds. Full of holes, Frederics body
can only be reconstituted through the mediation of a mechanical device. His
experience with the X-rays reveals precisely how modernity, in Armstrongs
terms, brings both a fragmentation and augmentation of the body in relation
to technology; it offers the body as lack, at the same time as it offers technological compensation (3).

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Trevor Dodman

The gap that opens up between lack and compensation, between Frederics disrupted body and his body-made-whole by machine intervention,
emerges in the text as Frederic refers to himself in the third person as the
patient (94). Echoing the earlier dissociation of Me and I, Frederic employs a similar prosthesis as a way for him to imagine and represent not his
own, imperfect, nonstandard body but rather the body of another, the body
of a perfectly standard patient. His act of divesting himself of the patient that
he was also carries with it a corresponding disregard for the patient that he
remains. Recourse to such reconstructive surgery, however, while speaking to
a desire for prosthetic wholeness, also underscores the notion that desired-for
wholeness is as much a construct as any generalized concept of patient.
The disjunction between the wounded Frederic and the patient, articulated as an uncanny interpenetration of body and machine, reminds us
that the human body is, according to Lennard J. Davis, always already a
fragmented body (62).11 Frederic establishes here a prosthetic relation to
the patient as a means of bypassing the awareness of his own body as a
fragmented, penetrated disunity: that body seen through the X-ray machine
is not mine but merely the body of the patient. He disarticulates himself
from his own fragmented body, an act that prefigures later divestments of
the body, such as when Frederic insists that his reconstructed knee belongs
not to himself but to the doctor who performed the operation: It was his
knee all right. The other knee was mine. Doctors did things to you and then
it was not your body any more (231). In the first instance, Frederic distances
himself from his own fragmented status as a patient and reveals a desire for
a continued understanding of the self as a whole. In the second, though he
foregrounds his fragmentationthat knee is hishe simultaneously reveals
a continued experience of the wounded body as a site of control and order, a
place where parts must still be understood as possessions of a whole self that
survives: this knee is mine.
And yet, just as the line between a patient and his prosthesis inevitably
blurs, just as the border between past and present dissolves, so too do certainties over bodily possessionover the integrity of the selfcome undone in
the face of extreme experiences and in the memories of those experiences.
If, as Scarry concludes, the record of war survives in the bodies, both alive
and buried, of those who were hurt there (113), then Frederics narrative
testifies to this. It records the story of his bodys hurting and his bodys survival, but buried in this record too are the remains of other bodies hurt beyond repair: Aymo, a shot sergeant, a stillborn son, Catherine. His wounding
and the wounding of others leave their trace on the narrative in the form of
prosthetic measures meant to keep their particular losses at bay. At the same
time though, like a local anaesthetic which froze the tissue and avoided pain
until the probe, the scalpel or the forceps got below the frozen portion (94),

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Frederics prosthesis cannot mitigate the overwhelming losses. He may want

to make things whole, but he cannot evade the trauma.
***
The principles of the treatment of haemorrhage are well established,
and are the same for both civil and military practice, and these
principles lay down an essential rule that bleeding is to be arrested
by pressure upon, or ligature of, the bleeding point itself, and not
by constriction of the limb above or by tying the artery on the
proximal side of the injury.
Injuries and Diseases of War (15)
After his initial operation, Frederic is sent to a field hospital farther behind
the lines. On the journey, the man above him, suffering an unstoppable
hemorrhage, bleeds onto the immobile Frederic. For a while, he notes, the
stream kept on, but eventually the drops of blood fell very slowly, as they
fall from an icicle after the sun has gone (61). Soon he feels the mans blood
pooling up around his own body: Where it had run down under my shirt
it was warm and sticky. A Farewell to Arms sketches a brief history of this
mans bleeding to death, but it also stands as a record of that which sticks to
Frederics recounting of his own troubled past. If history, as Cathy Caruth
contends, is precisely the way we are implicated in each others traumas
(Unclaimed 24), then Frederic remains implicated in the trauma of the man
above him as he collects the blood that drains out of him and collects it
again as he narrates the events in the present. The stream keeps on. At the
same time, however, as LaCapra notes,
certain wounds, both personal and historical, cannot simply heal
without leaving scars or residues in the present; there may even be
a sense in which they have to remain as open wounds even if one
strives to counteract their tendency to swallow all of existence and
incapacitate one as an agent in the present. (144)

Frederics prosthetic efforts to counteract the memories of passively collecting another mans blood, to arrest the hemorrhaging of his past into his
present, stand also as a reckoning with the continued activity of traumas
open wounds. Just as Frederic suspects that wars werent won anymore,
his narrative expresses anxieties about the uncontrollable persistence of
traumatic memories: Maybe they went on forever (118).
According to van der Kolk and van der Hart, extreme encounters disrupt the ordinary processing and integrating of experience into narrative
memory. Unable to assimilate such disturbing events, the survivor visits the

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traumatic memories again and again, tends to his or her open wounds, in an
involuntary effort to attach meaning to the horrors. Many survivors, they
write, experience long periods of time in which they live, as it were, in two
different worlds: the realm of the trauma and the realm of their current,
ordinary lifeand it is very often impossible to bridge these two worlds
(163). Like the prosthetic thinking that governs Frederics dissociated relations to the Me and the I of his wounding, to the patient he was and
continues to be, so too do the novels many stream-of-consciousness passages operate as instances of efforts to articulate past wounds in a current,
ordinary life of continued suffering. Early in the novel, Frederics drunken
discussion with the priest puts into circulation a number of elements that
his narrative continually returns to: I tried to tell about the night and the
difference between the night and the day and how the night was better
unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot
tell it now (13). Although Frederics narration here precedes the revelation that he suffered a serious wound, it nevertheless disrupts chronology
and thereby foregrounds his enduring commitment to an experience that
continually defies his efforts to narrate it. Despite his losses, he feels compelled to try again to tell the story, but finds that time has not helped him
represent his experience. I cannot tell it now: the admission speaks to his
struggle to articulate a set of wartime experiences that remain resistant to
the meaning-making structures of language.
The comment echoes later, when Catherine asks Frederic to explain the
retreat from Caporetto. Ill tell you about it if I ever get it straight in my
head, he replies (250). But despite his repeated claims that he cannot tell his
trauma, cannot put the story together for others or for himself, he does make
revealing efforts to find a language for his experiences. Remembering his reunion with Catherine after his escape from the army, Frederic cycles back to
his earlier remarks to the priest, blending past and present:
We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the
others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone
while I was with many girls and that is the way you can be most
lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were
together. I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things
are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the
day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful
time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. (249)

Infusing this passage is Frederics continued awareness that Catherines

permanent absence gives lasting shape to any articulation of the loneliness
of the night. On the train to Mestre, her absence shapes his description

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theres a hard floor for a wifeand he thinks to himself, you loved some
one else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended there (232). He
now knows that what happened to him once is not a singularity closed off
in the past but rather a complex of ongoing physiological and psychological
disturbances in his present.
Frederics attempts to articulate the things of the night repeatedly
involve his hospitalization and link his wound with the loss of Catherine.
Considering his always already traumatized state of mind, the following
scenedescribing a fantasy, before he is wounded, of his first night alone
with Catherineis particularly telling for its complex deployment of prosthetic thinking:
After supper I would go and see Catherine Barkley. I wish she
were here now. I wished I were in Milan with her. I would like
to eat at the Cova and then walk down Via Manzoni in the hot
evening and cross over and turn off along the canal and go to the
hotel with Catherine Barkley. Maybe she would. Maybe she would
pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the
front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop
at the concierges desk and ask for the key and she would stand by
the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would
go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and
the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step
out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I
would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take
down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca
in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the
pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I
would say leave it outside the door please. (3738)

Several revealing moments emerge, not the least of which is the sudden
intrusion of the presentI wish she were here nowon a recollection that
documents his past desires, suggesting Frederics existence in two worlds,
the ordinary and the traumatic. Departing briefly from the narrative lines
along which ordinary memory runs, Frederics traumatic memory registers
itself here, out of time and ahead of itself. His story of this vision in the past
simultaneously registers his hopeless desire for Catherine in the present.
Of greater interest, however, is how the rest of the novel gradually reveals
the extent to which prosthetic thinking controls this entire passage. For this
fantasy is nothing less than an idealized, prosthetically perfect vision of a series of experiences that, as it emerges later, are structured by Frederics wound.
The fantasy amalgamates and sterilizescleans outthree future episodes,

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performing a pastiche of wholeness, a radical effacing of Frederics disrupted

self. For in fact, Frederic and Catherine sleep together for the first time not in
a Milan hotel after a romantic dinner but in a Milan hospital before breakfast
is served. He does not arrive there with her after a pleasant walk along the
canal but travels from the freight yard (81) to the hospital in an ambulance.
There is no concierge desk, no boy to open the elevator door, and he rides the
elevator not with Catherine but with two stretcher-bearers who ignominiously bend his legs to fit into the crowded space. He and Catherine do not
walk along the hall together, and there is no key to put in the door; instead,
Frederic feels the pain going in and out of the bone (83) as they carry him
down a long hallway before putting him to bed.
A later episode is likewise prostheticized by the hotel fantasy:
At the door of the hospital the porter came out to help with
the crutches. I paid the driver, and then we rode upstairs in the
elevator. Catherine got off at the lower floor where the nurses lived
and I went on up and went down the hall on my crutches to my
room. (113)

Again, he and Catherine do not walk to a hotel and have the porter bring
them up a bottle of wine; instead, they return to the hospital where a porter
helps with the crutches, a crucial sign of Frederics disrupted body. Furthermore, they find themselves separated on entering the hospitaltheir liaison
punctuated at every turn by the realities of hospital life, by her role as a nurse
and by the limits of his status as an invalid. Where Frederic once wishes for
a silver bucket of ice left outside the door, he finds himself now crutching
along the corridors of the hospital after Catherine, a nurses aide carrying
the basins (113) of the other patients.
Of course, the couple at last do walk along the canal, share a hotel
room in Milan, hear the clicking of the elevator as it goes up to their floor,
enjoy a bottle of Capri together. However, the experience is anything but
idyllic. In light of his imminent return to the front, they are both despondent. Though the purchase of a new pistol, ironically enough, brightens the
mood, they arrive at the hotel only to find it worn and disreputable. This
was the best hotel we could get in, Frederic notes, and the blend of red
plush furnishings and satin bedding in their many-mirrored room leave
Catherine feeling like a whore (152). Though they do manage to enjoy
themselvesAfter we had eaten we felt fine, and then after, we felt very
happy (153)they nonetheless spend the remainder of their little time
together discussing the logistics of their expected child, and joking apprehensively about the possibility of Frederic being wounded again. Their time

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together is marked by shame, tension, and uncertaintyhardly the whole

night that the prosthetic version seamlessly delivers.
Frederics fantasy thus is governed by a powerful measure of prosthetic thinking meant to stave off the painful awareness not only of his wounding and subsequent hospital treatments but also of other losses. Crucially,
like the field service postcard he sends home with everything crossed out
except I am well (36), Frederics prosthetic fantasy involves crossing out
Catherines loss. Wishing she were here now, wishing he was still with the
British (37), he disregards not only the fact of Catherines death at the end
of the novel but also that shes been gone from its very beginning. Just as
in his dream she insists This doesnt make any difference between us. . . .
Im always here. I come whenever you want me (198), Frederic disregards
distance and death as he reconstitutes Catherine in his present. Always
here, she is essential to his efforts to reconstitute himself in the context
of her ongoing absence; narrating his present into wholeness requires that
Catherines broken past emerge here intact and filled once again with potential: That was how it ought to be (38). Casting himself in the role of a
fianc blown to bits, Frederic fantasizes about his capacity to compensate
for Catherines loss: Maybe she would. Maybe she would pretend that I
was her boy that was killed (37). The reiteration emphasizes, however, the
capacity of traumatic experiences to break apart any provisional efforts
at pretending away the lingering pain. The awkward wording also reflects
the inevitability of traumas return as Catherine once more confronts the
loss of her boy that was killed. That that return should implicate Frederic seems fitting, moreover, given his own continuing trauma. For in fact,
though he figures himself here as the embodiment of Catherines loss, such
make-believeeven in the context of a fantasycannot prevent the loss of
Catherine from continuing to embody him.
***
If bleeding has been difficult to stop, a note should always be
made on the field medical card, and this should also be marked
Urgent, in large letters.
Injuries and Diseases of War (17)
Just as his wounding breaches his perception of the boundaries of the
embodied subject, so too does bearing witness to Catherines death destabilize the boundaries between Frederic and his partner. Were the same one
(299), he once tells her, and, like a scar, she stubbornly remains, her losses
and wounds incorporated as his own: The head was mine, and the inside of
the belly (231). Elizabeth Grosz argues that scars become loci of exchange
between the inside and the outside, points of conversion of the outside into

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the body, and of the inside out of the body (36). But as points of conversion,
as neither inside nor outside, scars and, worse yet, open wounds challenge
the limits of both representation and empathetic response. In Frederics case,
Catherines cesarean section and hemorrhaging death demand his witness,
both then and now. Her loss becomes a destabilizing point of conversion
between his past and present. Difficult to stop, too well remembered to
be countered by prosthetic thinking, Catherines loss, her echoing voice and
broken body, takes shape as a trauma narrative relentlessly imposing itself
on Frederics ordinary narrative progression of events.
Paul Fussell described the shocking horrors of mechanized mass slaughter in related terms: the Great War was perhaps the last to be conceived
as taking place within a seamless, purposeful history involving a coherent
stream of time running from past through present to future (21). More recently, Trudi Tate considers veterans and civilians alike struggling to convey a
history one has lived through but not seen, or seen only partially (1). Thus,
in the place of a coherent stream of time, trauma survivors experience what
Caruth describes as a future and past united through a profound discontinuity (Unclaimed 14). In Frederics narrative, this shattering of his subjective
experience of time, this radical discontinuity between his traumatic history
and traumatized present, is repeatedly figured by references to the breaking
of individuals, epitomized by Catherines cry Im going all to pieces (322).
In elaborating thisIm not brave anymore, darling. Im all broken. Theyve
broken me. I know it now (323)Catherine gives voice to a whole set of
concerns about the disunity of the embodied subject, confirming what Frederic already knows about himself: that the legshis own legsresemble
freshly ground hamburger steak (95).
If we return, then, to their first night at the hotel after he deserts, we
find Frederic speaking Catherines later words: The world breaks every one
and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it will not
break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave
impartially (249). Her words, that is, appear as a traumatic intrusion of the
past on a retrospective narrative given in the present. Like an echo before the
sound, like the sudden interiors of houses (6) that appear to Frederic after
bouts of shelling, these words register in the text disconcertingly out of place
and ahead of their time. Fulfilling what Caruth identifies as the traumatic
potential for the outside [to go] inside without any mediation (Unclaimed
59), they become Frederics words; he gives them voiceor rather they voice
themselves through him, illustrating how the experience of a trauma repeats
itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor
and against his very will (2).

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Catherines feeling that she is going all to pieces becomes literalized on

the operating table, raising the question once more of the relation of a body
in pain to a traumatized mind:
I thought Catherine was dead. She looked dead. Her face was
gray, the part of it that I could see. Down below, under the light,
the doctor was sewing up the great long, forcep-spread, thickedged, wound. Another doctor in a mask gave the anaesthetic.
Two nurses in masks handed things. It looked like a drawing of
the Inquisition. I knew as I watched I could have watched it all,
but I was glad I hadnt. I do not think I could have watched them
cut, but I watched the wound closed into a high welted ridge with
quick skilful-looking stitches like a cobblers, and was glad. When
the wound was closed I went out into the hall and walked up and
down again. (325)

Broken apart and sewn back together, Catherine takes center stage in the
operating theater. However, as the wound gets closed she seems to get swallowed up by it, disappearing from the scene, becoming, in effect, all wound.
Frederic no longer sees Catherine anesthetized on the table but only the
wound: great, long, forcep-spread, thick-edged, high-welted, closed. Her
reduction to an unspeaking wound would seem to contrast with Frederics
position, both as a witness in the gallery and as the narrator of the scene. At
the same time, however, the moment replays Frederics own wounding and
battlefield operation. He thinks shes dead, just as he once knew he had
died; he looks down from above on Catherines body, just as he once floated
out from his own; he avoids watching the cutting, just as he does while on
the slippery table himself. Catherines disrupted, broken body thus confronts
him with his own shattered frame; her unknowing, passive silence confronts
him with the wordless holes in his own experience.
Overwhelmed, Frederic shifts suddenly to relate the parable of the ants.
The detail and specificity of the memorythe ants scurrying back and forth
on the burning log, his steaming rather than saving them (327)contrast
with the vagueness of its time and place. Does it happen before the war, or
after? Before Catherines death, or in the aftermath? Either way, witnessing
Catherines cesarean section and death, Frederic turns to a time and place
where a sense of his own agency, however ambivalent, remains intact. The
respite, however, is only momentary, and Frederic returns to the scene of the
wounds that wont heal: So now I sat out in the hall and waited to hear how
Catherine was (328). From Frederics double perspective at the time of the
telling Catherine is, of course, both dead and dying. So now he waits in the
hall, unable to escape the thought of watching the doctor sew up. Though

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his sons death registers with little emotionSo hes dead (327)the loss
of the boy and Catherine becomes entangled with his own wounds, sewn
together into Frederics present articulation of their absences.
So active, so now, these deaths remain alive for Frederic. They hemorrhage through the narrativereminders that while many are strong at the
broken places, vulnerabilities remain. If, as Caruth observes, trauma emerges
as a kind of double telling, the oscillation between . . . the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival
(Unclaimed 7), A Farewell to Arms constitutes just this kind of double telling.
Driven by the tension between the patient and his prosthesis, between the
Me who cries out on the operating table and the I who looks down and
sees two broken bodies, Frederics prosthetic narrative cannot mend his shattered past. In his unbearable present, any former understanding of the self
seems hopelessly lost. As he himself notes about his Saint Anthony talisman,
After I was wounded I never found him (44).
On his way to the battle that will see him wounded, Frederic considers the gift from Catherine: The Saint Anthony was in a little white metal
capsule. I opened the capsule and spilled him out into my hand (43). He
reassembles it, undoes his uniform, and puts the chain around his neck: I felt
him in his metal box against my chest while we drove. Then I forgot about
him (44). Spilled out and put back again, Saint Anthony goes to pieces but
returns to wholeness in Frederics hands, and in his retelling is again spilled
out and put back, remembered though still missing. Like Frederics narrative itself, Saint Anthony is both scar and open wound. And so A Farewell to
Armsan aftereffect, a note marked Urgentmanifests a search for what
is lost that cannot end.

No t e s
1. I use the terms trauma and shell shock interchangeably, despite the fact that
contemporary critics rightly insist on their historical situatedness along a convoluted
path marked by stretches of collective forgetting and frenzied attention: from
nineteenth-century theories about hysteria and railway spine to First World War
conceptions of shell shock, Second World War experiences with combat fatigue,
the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of returning Vietnam veterans and
survivors of incest and abuse, and, finally, present-day conceptions of the disorder
that increasingly incorporate both neurophysiological and psychological models in
research and treatment. Current understandings of trauma have come a long way
from Great Warera debates over brain lesions and explosions as the roots of shell
shock, but many congruencies remain between our understanding now and then,
including a shared emphasis on disruptions to the embodied subjects relation to
language, memory, and time. Much as it was during the Great War years, trauma
theory today remains a deeply and bitterly contested field marked by controversy
and competing theory. Moreover, shell shock and trauma both point out one thing

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that current research confirms and Frederics narrative illustrates: any attempts
to articulate shell shock, to put trauma into words, involves the unavoidable,
unpredictable, and perhaps unknowable impress of the past on an embodied subjects
present.
For detailed treatments of the histories I have alluded to here, see Allan Young
and Ruth Leys. Judith Hermans important and thorough Trauma and Recovery
provides a feminist accounting of the history of trauma as well as an analysis of
modes of treatment in the face of traumas staying power. Ben Shephard offers a
full-length, detailed history focused largely on military psychiatry that criticizes the
current direction of trauma studies. Hans Binneveld offers a more concise and less
polemical overview.
2. Armstrong explores the human body not only as a locus of anxiety, even
crisis (4) but also as a site for recovery and regeneration through mechanical and
technological intervention. Kirby Farrell extends Armstrongs terms outward from
the human body, noting that prosthetic linkages between humans and society
develop rapidly in the modernist period. For Farrell, trauma reflects a disruption
of our prosthetic relationships to the world. By exposing the constructed and
interdependent nature of our existence, it makes vivid how radically vulnerable and
ephemeral we are (176). A Farewell to Arms stages shell shocks radical disrupting
of subjectivity throughout a narrative that precisely testifies to the vulnerabilities of
a self cut off from the web of prosthetic relations offering security and helping to
locate meaning.
3. Hemingways relations to the Great War and his own wounding are
concerns that he returns to again and again in his career. Numerous critical attempts
have been made to establish connections between the wartime experiences of the
author and his Great War novel, suggesting links between memories that both
author and protagonist seem unable to move beyond. For recent detailed treatments
of Hemingways construction of the novel, see Rena Sanderson, Charles Oliver, and
Linda Wagner-Martin. Other important treatments of the novel include Michael
Reynoldss Hemingways First War and Bernard Stanley Oldsey. Matthew Stewart
considers these matters in the wider context of Hemingways entire career.
4. The early to mid-1990s witnessed an explosion of interdisciplinary interest
in trauma. Critics such as Judith Herman, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Cathy
Caruth, Kali Tal, and Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart contributed
works that address the intersections of history, memory, medicine, psychoanalysis,
and literature. Numerous anthologies also appeared, each marked by a particular
approach or set of approaches: the psychoanalytically inflected Trauma: Explorations
in Memory edited by Cathy Caruth, the juridical and scientific studies of Trauma and
Memory edited by Paul Applebaum et al., the neurobiologically focused Traumatic
Stress edited by van der Kolk et al., and the discursive identity politics of Tense Past
edited by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. Several recent anthologies productively
merge trauma studies with other important domains such as comparative genocide
studies, geopolitics, and the ethics of witnessing. See in particular Extremities,
edited by Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw; Topologies of Trauma, edited by Linda
Belau and Peter Ramadanovic; Trauma at Home, edited by Judith Greenberg; and
Witness and Memory, edited by Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler.
While the works of Caruth and van der Kolk help in particular to focus
my argument about A Farewell to Arms, it is important to acknowledge that their
versions of traumatic operations have detractors. LaCapra, for instance, suggests that

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in the affectively charged (109) writing of Caruth, trauma may itself be sacralized
as a catastrophic revelation or, in more secular terms, be transvalued as the radical
other or the sublime (108). Such transvaluing can foreclose possibilities for working
through by reifying trauma as fully and radically unknowable. And van der Kolk,
in LaCapras view, privileges neuroscience over the nuances of psychoanalysis: he
relies on an overly functional specific model of the brain (109) and conveniently
splits off repression from dissociation and resists any notion of their connection
(108). Chapter-length critiques of Caruth and van der Kolk also appear in Leys, who
charges both theorists with manipulative readings and research and disputes their
claims about the literal truths of inscribed traumatic memories. However, the recent
book by Jenny Edkins offers a direct challenge to Leyss critique of Caruth, charging
Leys herself with manipulative misreading:
It is not the case that truth is said to exist in the memory images thought
to be implanted by trauma any more than it is to be found in our original
perceptions. We do not have access to these images (other than as images)
without interpreting or making sense of them. We cannot pass them on
unvarnished to others. (39)

As for van der Kolk, Leyss charges notwithstanding, there is much to be found
in the work of other trauma theoristsBabette Rothschild, Bruce D. Perry, and
Belleruth Naparstek, for exampleto support the notion that traumatic experience
invokes both mind and body. Perry writes:
All areas of the brain and body are recruited and orchestrated for optimal
survival tasks during the threat. This total neurobiological participation in the
threat response is important in understanding how a traumatic experience can
impact and alter functioning in such a pervasive fashion. Cognitive, emotional,
social, behavioral and physiological residues of a trauma may impact an
individual for yearseven a lifetime. (14)

As it happens, my own critique of Caruths work may be leveled here. After

Freud, who suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that wounds or injuries suffered
in the context of a frightful surprise tend to work against the development of a
neurosis (12), Caruth contends that the wound of the mindthe breach in the
minds experience of time, self, and the worldis not, like the wound of the body,
a simple and healable event (Unclaimed Experience 4). Her privileging of mind over
body, of psychic wounds over physical ones, however, leaves largely out of the picture
the upshot of some of the most interesting conclusions about the impact of trauma
on the embodied subject. In contrast, Frederics narrative presciently considers
the interpenetration of mind and body in the wake of traumatic experiences and
problematizes the notion of wounds of any sort as simple and healable event[s].
5. Fine work by Mary Prescott and James Nagel, for instance, gestures toward
trauma in the context of Frederics narrative efforts. Prescott explores the processes
by which Frederic reconstructs events so that he can make sense of them (43).
Along similar lines, Nagel considers Frederics retrospective efforts at coming to
terms emotionally with the events (171). But neither essay follows through on the
narrative aftereffects in Frederics version of his past.

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6. Margot Norris suggests that A Farewell to Arms is less a novel about war
than a novel as war (693) and provides a particularly illuminating connection
to what trauma theorists document as the aggressive operations of trauma. She
convincingly argues that Hemingways text delivers acts of narrative aggression
(694) that refigure, in rhetorical terms, the aggression of combat (695). Norris
reads inconsistencies and ruptures in the novel as coercive efforts to efface
responsibility for the violence of war, and I read them as evidence of the suffering
of profound traumas. To paraphrase Norris herself, A Farewell to Arms is less a novel
about trauma than a novel as trauma.
The works of Lisa Tyler and Richard Badenhausen might also be considered
here in the context of Frederics trauma narrative. In Tylers article Frederic masters
his trauma by making of it an ordered narrative (91). While I do agree that
Frederics retelling of his losses should be considered in terms of efforts at resistance
and as a measure of healing, to suggest that his narrative triumphs over trauma
(91) is to overlook the extent to which his past relentlessly continues to intrude on his
present in ways that I contend are beyond his control. Badenhausen analyzes Vera
Brittains Testament of Youth as a working through of the trauma of her wartime
losses. Though the redemptive nature of this reading does not help me to account for
what I perceive in A Farewell to Arms as the continued debilitating effects of trauma
that work at denying the satisfactions of closure, Badenhausens work nonetheless
provides compelling analysis of the workings of trauma with respect to narrative.
7. Phelan insists that with few exceptions, Frederic speaks from his perspective
at the time of the action (68). Reynolds suggests that the only difference between
Frederic in the nurses garden and in the Milan hospital is his violent wounding.
Like a victim of shell shock, he exhibits altered feelings, affection, temper, and
habits (Doctors 120). Like Phelan, Reynolds assumes that the novel operates in
terms of a pre- and postwounding dynamic, but I suggest that there is no way to
untangle Frederics post-traumatic narration from his present version of the past.
8. Another key source for interpreting his injury remains the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the manuals terms, PTSD may develop in
those who have been exposed to extreme events or stressors
involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or
threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to ones physical integrity;
or witnessing an event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical
integrity of another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death,
serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or
other close associate. (463)

Frederic, an ambulance driver on the Austro-Italian front, remains consistently

exposed, both directly and indirectly, to such events. Even a partial list will suggest
the extremes involved. Blown up and wounded himself, he attends to Passini: One
leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser and the
stump twitched and jerked as though it were not connected (55). Participating in
the massive Italian retreat from Caporetto, Frederic loses one of his men, beloved
Aymo: He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward
and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes
(213). Threatened with summary execution for his officers rank, Frederic evades
rifle fire by plunging into the river:

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Trevor Dodman
I thought then I would drown because of my boots, but I thrashed and fought
through the water, and when I looked up the bank was coming toward me,
and I kept thrashing and swimming in a heavy-footed panic until I reached
it. (227)

And finally, Frederic loses his soncord was caught around his neck or something
(327)only hours before he loses his partner: It seems she had one hemorrhage
after another. They couldnt stop it. I went into the room and stayed with Catherine
until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long
to die (331).
9. Babette Rothschilds work in The Body Remembers: Casebook suggests that
during a traumatic incident the brains limbic system signals to the sympathetic
nervous system (SNS) for preparation to fight or fly; if neither of these options
seems appropriate, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) initiates the freeze
response: The SNS continues its extreme arousal while the PNS freezes the action
of the body (6). Although freezing only occurs when the individuals perception is
that the threat is extreme and escape impossible (7), Rothschild speculates that the
toll on the frozen subjectincluding intense feelings of shame and humiliation
may be greater afterward because of the lingering belief that more could have been
done.
10. Rothschild notes that PTSDs long-term aftereffects may damage or
destroy a survivors ability to differentiate between external stimuli and to make use
of the bodys signals to itself regarding threats:
The ability to orient to safety and danger becomes decreased when many
things, or sometimes everything, in the environment are perceived as
dangerous. When daily reminders of trauma become extreme, freezing or
dissociation can be activated as if the trauma were occurring in the present. It
can become a vicious cycle. (Psychophysiology 14)

11. Concerned mostly with the (in)visibility of the disabled body, Davis offers
a stirring condemnation of the reception of disability that structures the art worlds
perceptions and attitudes about the presence of difference (56) and the traditional
ableist assumptions (52) that permeate virtually all corridors of Western life. He
suggests that any conception of the body as a whole is based on a repression of
the fragmentary nature of the body (59) as it is experienced early in ones psychic
and physiological development and reinforced by a culture deeply invested in this
repression.
I am extremely grateful for Laura Tanners guidance and efforts at every
stage in the writing of this essay. The insights offered by Rosemarie Bodenheimer
and James Krasner along the way are also much appreciated. As ever, I extend my
deepest thanks to Amy Winchester for her constant support and encouragement.

Wor k s Ci t e d
Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambek, eds. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory.
New York: Routledge, 1996.

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Appelbaum, Paul S., Lisa A. Uyehara, and Mark R. Elin, eds. Trauma and Memory: Clinical
and Legal Controversies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Badenhausen, Richard. Mourning through Memoir: Trauma, Testimony, and Community
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421448.
Belau, Linda, and Petar Ramadanovic, eds. Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of
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. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
Davis, Lennard J. Nude Venuses, Medusas Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and
Visuality. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ed. David T.
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Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: American
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2003.
Farrell, Kirby. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. Trans. James Strachey. The Standard
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Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Greenberg, Judith, ed. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2003.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribners, 1995.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic, 1992.
Herndl, Diane Price. Invalid Masculinity: Silence, Hospitals, and Anaesthesia in A Farewell
to Arms. Hemingway Review 21.1 (Fall 2001): 3852.
Injuries and Diseases of War: A Manual Based on Experience of the Present Campaign in France.
London: His Majestys Stationery Office, 1918.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001.
Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Miller, Nancy K., and Jason Tougaw, eds. Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community.
Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Nagel, James. Catherine Barkley and Retrospective Narration in A Farewell to Arms. Ernest
Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1987. 171185.
Naparstek, Belleruth. Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal. New York:
Bantam, 2004.
Norris, Margot. The Novel as War: Lies and Truth in Hemingways A Farewell to Arms.
Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994): 689710.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley. Hemingways Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.
Oliver, Charles, ed. Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms: A Documentary Volume. Detroit:
Thomson, 2005.
Perry, Bruce D. The Memories of States: How the Brain Stores and Retrieves Traumatic
Experience. Splintered Reflections: Images of the Body in Trauma. Ed. Jean Goodwin
and Reina Attias. New York: Basic, 1999. 938.
Phelan, James. Distance, Voice, and Temporal Perspective in Frederic Henrys Narration:
Successes, Problems, and Paradox. New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. Ed. Scott
Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 5373.
Prescott, Mary. A Farewell to Arms: Memory and the Perpetual Now. College Literature 17.1
(1990): 4152.
Reynolds, Michael. A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the House of Love. The Cambridge
Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996. 109127.
. Hemingways First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. 1976. New York:
Blackwell, 1987.
Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: Casebook. New York: Norton, 2003.
. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New
York: Norton, 2000.
Sanderson, Rena, ed. Hemingways Italy: New Perspectives. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2006.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000.
Stewart, Matthew C. Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent
Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War. Papers on Language and
Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 36.2 (Spring
2000): 198217.
Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996.
Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History, and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University
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Tyler, Lisa. Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingways Retelling of
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and Onno van der Hart. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and
the Engraving of Trauma. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 158182.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide.
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Wills, David. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Young, Allan. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995.
Young, James E. Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness. Witness and
Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. Ed. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler. New
York: Routledge, 2003. 275283.

Z oe T rodd

Hemingways Camera Eye:

The Problem of Language
and an Interwar Politics of Form
One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply ones words as to endure
ones thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have
deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been
more over-strained and knocked about and voided than in all the long ages
before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or,
otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through an increase of limpness,
that may well make us wonder.
Henry James, 1915

t some point during the process of writing A Farewell to Arms (1929),

Ernest Hemingway typed out part of a 1915 New York Times interview with
Henry James. The quotation, which Hemingway left between the pages of
his own manuscript, expresses doubt over languages ongoing capacity for
expression; James worries that the war has used up words so that we are
now confronted . . . with a loss of expression through an increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk (34).
Hemingway prefaced this snippet with the phrase: on the debasement of
words by war. Then, echoing Jamess sentiments about ghostly or limp
words and noting their oppositethe concreteFrederic Henry famously
observes in A Farewell to Arms that [a]bstract words such as glory, honor,

The Hemingway Review, Volume 26, Number 2 (2007): pp. 721. Copyright 2007 The
Ernest Hemingway Foundation.

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courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the
numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the
dates (165).1
While James questioned what ghosts will be left to walk, Hemingway
chose to offer skeletons instead. As Paul Fussell explains, Second World War
writers would eventually express a general skepticism about the former languages of glory and sacrifice and patriotism. They were [s]ick of the inflated
idiom of official morale-boosting tub-thumping and all the slynesses of wartime publicity and advertising, and preferred to speak in understatement,
glancing less at the center of a topic than at its edges (xxv). Long before
this, however, Hemingways limited vocabulary, few adjectives, and concrete
descriptions of specific objects all countered with minimalism the problem of
used up words.
Yet alongside Hemingways skeletal sentences was another solution to
the increase of limpness: a camera-eye aesthetic that re-embodied reality
and expelled the ghosts. This aesthetic was often multi-focal. Imitating film
rather than single-shot still photography, it rejected all apparently coherent
and exclusive ways of perceiving the world, and asked readers to mistrust
all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together
(SAR 12). Against these stories that hold together, his multi-focal aesthetic asserted the existence of various angles (SAR 35); after all, the nose
of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises (1926) could have been flattened in
a boxing ring, or by a horse, or maybe his mother had been frightened or
seen something (12).
Built upon his iceberg theory of omission and taken up as a style by
1930s writers, Hemingways aesthetic tried to grasp the many things which
it is necessary to know (238), as he puts it in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). It
was a politics of form that reached for what George Orwell famously termed
unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in
the newspapers (Arthur Koestler 220). Hemingway noted the hole in the
story (qtd. in Plimpton 88). Then, with his multi-focal aesthetic, he acknowledged the whole story.2
I. Youll Lose It If You Talk about It:
Diagnosing and Solving the Problem of Language
Writing in the aftermath of what Bertrand Russell called in 1914 the First
World Wars foul literature of glory (clichd accounts of heroism and sacrifice, often in the passive voice), Hemingway reiterated Jamess idea of used
up words across his own work (qtd. in Dentith 133): Nick Adams believes
that [t]alking about anything was bad. Writing about anything actual was
bad. It always killed it (On Writing 237); Krebs of Soldiers Home
(1925) discovers that stories strip experience of its cool valuable quality

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211

and that everyone has heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities (IOT 70); and Hemingway observes in Death in the Afternoon (1932)
that all our words from loose using have lost their edge (71). Confirming
the communicative failures of language, The Sun Also Rises even contains
scenes that omit Jake Barness responses to questions:
Dont you think so, Jake?
Theres a fight to-night, Bill said. Like to go? (85).

And:
Did you get my line, Jake?
The cab stopped in front of the hotel and we all went in (95).

The war has used up men, like the war-wounded and impotent Jake, and has
apparently used up words as well.3
Within his form, Hemingway embedded a further commentary upon
languages depleted capacity for expression. For example, his paratactic syntaxwhich juxtaposes clauses and like syntactic units without subordinating
conjunctionscreates static, abrupt sentences that seem to stammer or bark;
anticipating Arthur Koestlers Darkness at Noon (1941), where the leaders
of the Revolution have tongues that stammered and barked (120). In For
Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan intends to write a book when he got
through with this (238), but knows that to get a full picture of what is happening you cannot read only the party organ (236), that he will have to be
a much better writer than he is now because the things he had come to
know in this war were not so simple (238). As though confirming the not
so simple nature of possibly inexpressible things and the problem of how
to represent the full picture of the war, the novels dialogue is stilted and
foreign. Hemingway uses non-standard but technically grammatical English
(I did not like, let us go, we go now, I am content we are started, It
is a name I can never dominate), and potentially offensive words are awkwardly replaced with words like obscenity or unprintable. He eventually
highlights the deliberate foreignness of his language in this novel, writing:
Continue thy story, Massart said to Andres; using the term story as you
would say lie, falsehood, or fabrication (395).4
Both Hemingways paratactic syntax and his use of non-standard English were a politics of form that expressed the damage done to language
by abstractions like glory, honor, courage, as Frederic Henry puts it in A
Farewell to Arms. After Hemingway, more overtly politicized writers would
explore the same problem and propose the solution of a camera-eye aesthetic.
For example, James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) protests

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what he calls the breakdown of the identification of word and object (209)
and asserts that words cannot embody, they can only describe (210). By way
of solution, Agee proposes that the camera is the central instrument of our
time (9) and explains: If I could do it, Id do no writing at all here. It would
be photographs (4). His imagination throughout Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men is photographic: sunlight is like a flash bulb and a child is a photographic plate (198). In addition, Agees focus throughout on the process of
writing means his words come to light like a developing photograph: Agee
wrote, then looked to see what was written. Describing, meditating, and analyzing all at once, as well as noting you mustnt be puzzled by this, Im writing in a continuum (62), he created sentences, paragraphs and a whole book
without narrative or chronology. His writing is series of static word-pictures
that proceed through long repetitive sentences and mingled tenses, as in the
very last sentence of the book: each of these matters had in that time the
extreme clearness which I shall now try to give you; until at length we too fell
asleep (416), he writes, moving from past tense to present to past.5
Koestler too attempted to diagnose and solve the problem of language.
In The Invisible Writing (1954) he remembered that during the 1930s his
feelings toward art, literature, and human relations became reconditioned
and . . . [his] vocabulary, grammar, syntax gradually changed . . . [as he] learnt
to avoid any original expression, any individual turn of phrase . . . Language,
and with it thought, underwent a process of dehydration, and crystallized in
the ready-made schematic (2526). This problem of language means that
in Darkness at Noon inner processes are spoken of contemptuously, merely
as an abstraction (125). Koestlers characterization therefore depends upon
gesture and physical details rather than words: Rubashov fiddles with his
pince-nez (he is nervy, obsessive); Richard has an over-active Adams apple
and inflamed eyes (he is vulnerable and cannot see his fast-approaching fate).
The novel often progresses through external observations, as when the prison
doctor probes inside Rubashovs mouth and [s]uddenly Rubashov became
pale and had to lean against the wall (66). Two lines later the reader knows
what the character feels (the pain was throbbing . . . ), but initially must
judge Rubashovs reaction from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. At moments
this perspective is even aligned with the spying eyes of characters in the novel.
Koestler writes: The eye which had been observing him [Rubashov] for several minutes through the spy-hole withdrew (48) and then ends section ten
of the book, forcing the reader to withdraw as well.
Rubashov himself eventually realizes the power of external observation (the camera-eye perspective) when he contemplates the removal of a
photograph from a wall in the prison, and has the strange wish, almost a
physical impulse, to touch the light patch on the wall [where the photograph
of the leaders used to be] with his fingers (77). A few years later George

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213

Orwell would echo Koestler, again using the theme of photography to connect the physical evidence of peoples existence with their humanity. Just as
language fails the characters of Hemingway, Agee, and Koestler, so it fails
Orwells characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Their words are like a
leaden knell (86) or some monstrous machine running without oil (13).
Goldsteins voice becomes a sheeps bleat (16). Mrs. Parsons speaks in halfsentences throughout, and the gym instructress yaps and barks (29). The telescreen gives a furious deafening roar (189) and later a cracked, braying
jeering note, a yellow note (236). At one point Winston Smith is deprived
of the power of speech, so that his tongue works soundlessly (141), and
Winston and Julia can eventually only echo one another: You dont feel the
same . . . you dont feel the same . . . we must meet again . . . we must meet
again (235). Throughout the novel Winston clings wordlessly to concrete
objects: a diary, a paperweight, and a photograph. It thrills him to hold the
photograph, a fragment of the abolished past (66), and eventually he all he
wants is to hold the photograph in his fingers again (198). Remembering
that image, he is able to tell OBrien in the Ministry of Love: I think I exist
. . . I occupy a particular point in space. No other object can occupy the same
point simultaneously (208).6
Other writers went further still in their proffered diagnoses of and solutions to the problem of language. In The Big Money (1936), John Dos Passos
protests the monotonous mumble of words (459), a public made goofy
(52) and groggy with headlines (193), its eyes bleared with newspaperreading (149) and with the journalistic back-formations and blends that
make language a thing of quick turnover, cheap interchangeable easilyreplaced standardized parts (50).7 Like Agee and Koestler, Dos Passos wanted
to generate the insides . . . of characters by external description (qtd. in
Diggins 238), as he once explained to Edmund Wilson (who wrote to remind him of this intention in 1939). Dos Passos tried to see things unusually vividly, the brilliant winter day, the etched faces of people sitting in the
waitingroom, the colors on the magazines in the newsstand (The Big Money
124). But Dos Passos moved beyond the aesthetic of a one-shot photograph
to reach for a multi-focal camera-eye. He explained that he tried to record
the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it (qtd. in Pizer
272) and in The Big Money offered mini-biographies and Newsreel sections
that function as background shots, and Camera Eye sections that function
as close-ups.
Dos Passos used this multi-focal aesthetic to assert the existence of multiple, unofficial histories, explaining in a 1964 interview that they offered another dimension . . . things that were going on at the same time as the actual
narrative (qtd. in Madden 7). He reiterated in 1968 that his Newsreel and
Camera Eye sections offered a different dimension: I was trying to put

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across a complex state of mind, an atmosphere, and I brought in these things

partly for contrast and partly for getting a different dimension (42). In the
introduction to U.S.A. (1938), he even translated his multi-focal aesthetic into
a literary manifesto: U.S.A. is . . . a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and
dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled in the margins in pencil (7).
These layers of communicationpublic library, newspapers, history books,
and margin scrawlsoffered a different dimension and were a reminder of
the existence of unofficial histories during what Dos Passos called in 1939
a very odd period in human history when it is very difficult to make broad
generalizations about events (27). In his work, the existence of a different
dimension even means, for example, that while Frank Lloyd Wright in The
Big Money tries to walk with long eager steps / towards the untrammeled
future (432), the line-break after steps confirms that there are no long eager
stepsno untrammeled future. There is only the halting progress of multiple
angles upon the same story.
Dos Passos, Orwell, Koestler, and Agee are acknowledged far more often than Hemingway as authors of work containing a clear politics and a clear
politics of form. For Orwell, Koestler, and Agee the solution to the problem
of a loss of expression, as James put it in 1915, was photography; apparent as
a theme in the work of all three writers, and as a camera-eye aesthetic in the
work of Agee and Koestler. For Dos Passos, the solution was a film aesthetic;
multi-focal rather than one-shot. But Hemingways diagnosis of a loss of expression led him to a comparable politics of form: across Hemingways work
are the threads of both a one-shot photograph aesthetic and a multi-shot
film aesthetic. Together, these camera-eyes answer the problem of abstract
language, official history, and the perceived sensation thatin the words of
Jake Barnes[y]oull lose it if you talk about it (SAR 249).8
II. Just Like the Moving Pictures:
Hemingways Multi-Focal Camera-Eye
In 1922, Hemingway used a snapshot style to create a montage of juxtapositions. The piece Paris 1922 begins and re-begins, each listed description containing the phrase I have seen in its opening. He revised this
device for the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, which also begins and
re-begins: there were pebbles . . . there were many orchards . . . There
was fighting . . . There was much traffic . . . There were big guns . . .
There was fighting . . . There were mists . . . There were small gray motor
cars (34). This process of re-beginning seems to create what Gertrude
Stein in Composition as Explanation (1926) called a beginning again
and again and so a continuous present (457). Perhaps experiencing such
a continuous present, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls then feels
that a whole lifetime might be crammed into three days. [I]t is possible

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215

to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years, he muses, later

thinking: This is how you live a life in two days (161, 164).9
Both Paris 1922 and the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms represent
Hemingways wider aesthetic on the micro-level. His short sentences and long
paratactic ones resist linear progression. Written in a staccato rhythm, without
subordination, the sentences achieve stasis through structure. Events pile up
and the result is a sense of eyewitness. This commitment to a de-authored,
eyewitness style may have been one of the factors driving him to rewrite the
ending of A Farewell to Arms multiple times. One of the novels early endings
emphasizes its status as text: I could tell what has happened since then, but
that is the end of the story. The published ending just ends the story: After a
while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain
(294). This rewrite makes the ending less self-conscious, less authored, and
more photographic. Similarly, Hemingway rewrote the opening of The Sun
Also Rises, editing out self-conscious passages like the following: In life people
are not conscious of these special moments that novelists build their whole
structures on . . . None of the significant things are going to have any literary
signs marking them. You have to figure them out by yourself.10
But while using this de-authored and potentially static eyewitness style
across his work, Hemingway often chose to undercut its effect. Alongside his
one-shot photograph aesthetic, with its accompanying stasis, was a multifocal camera eye. For example, one source for the fishing section in The Sun
Also Rises is Hemingways 1922 article for the Toronto Daily Star, Fishing the
Rhone Canal. In both the novel and the original article, the narrator catches
a trout and then sits under a tree to read. In the novel he reads something by
A. E. W. Mason . . . about a man who had been frozen in the Alps and then
fallen into a glacier and disappeared (124125), and this glacier appears in
the article too, along with a warning about perception. The waterfall descending from the glacier looks solid, then appears to be movingas though shifting between still and motion picture photography:
It was a hot day, but I could look out across the green, slow valley
past the line of trees that marked the course of the Rhone and
watch a waterfall coming down the brown face of the mountain.
The fall came out of a glacier that reached down toward a little
town with four grey houses and three grey churches that was
planted on the side of the mountain and looked solid, the waterfall,
that is, until you saw it was moving (BL 33).

In addition, the sudden presence of something by A. E. W. Mason

reminds the reader that multiple stories existlike the various tales of how
Cohns nose was flattened. As an embedded text, it is an alternate story and

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a reminder of what Hemingway called various angles (SAR 35), or what

Dos Passos called in 1968 a different dimension (42).11
Hemingways prose, which he repeatedly described as an iceberg, is also
a glacier waterfall, infused with movement by his multi-focal aesthetic. He
proceeds with a focus upon the now and the perception and insistence of
sequenced and repetitive, but never identical, nows (qtd. in Knapp 96), as
Stein put it (with reference to her own work). While he does repeat words
throughout a paragraph, he often uses the repetition to slowly progressrepresenting an image or idea from a different angle. A passage toward the end
of The Sun Also Rises is one example:
It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with trees
and grass where there were taxis parked. A taxi came up the street,
the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver
where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the
street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against
each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me
comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked
sharply white (250251).

The repetition of hot and bright is really a new impressionthe second

hot and bright prefaced by veryand the middle section of the paragraph contains three angle-shots (Brett moved close to me. We sat close
against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me
comfortably). The word close links the first two sentences of this middle
section, and the against links the second and third sentences: the effect
is of one of slow-motion progression, two steps forward and one step back.
As Stein wrote in Composition as Explanation, everything being alike
everything naturally everything is different simply different naturally simply
different (460).
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway offers a description that encapsulates this style. He compares the movement of a bullfighter to a slow
motion picture, for the mans movement is a long glide that creates
prolong[ed] . . . vision, instead of a jerk (14). Elsewhere Hemingway
offered a formula for this kind of multi-stage progression, using a billiards
metaphor to explain that it is all done with three-cushion shots (qtd. in
Breit 14). Or, offering yet another formula for his style, he wrote to Edmund Wilson: Finished the book of 14 stories with a chapter of In Our
Time between each storythat is the way they were meant to goto give
the picture of the whole between examining it in detail. This was, he explained, like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coastline,
and then looking at it with 15x binoculars. Or rather maybe, looking at it

Hemingways Camera Eye

217

and then going in and living in itand then coming out and looking at
it again (SL 128). Focusing and refocusing his camera-eye, Hemingways
picture of the whole and his examinations in detail rendered in prose a
series of filmic wide-shots and close-ups.12
Further developing his moving-picture aesthetic, Hemingway sometimes used a cutting technique, shifting between Jim and Liz in Up in Michigan (1923) with the speed of celluloid spinning in a theater projector:
Jim began to feel great . . . He had another drink. The men came
in to supper feeling hilarious but acting very respectable. Liz sat
at the table after she put the food on and ate with the family. . . .
After supper they went into the front room again and Liz cleaned
off with Mrs Smith . . . Jim and Charley were still in the front
room. Liz was in the kitchen next to the stove pretending to read
a book and thinking about Jim (CSS 61).13

A similarly filmic construction appears during chapters 3342 of For Whom

the Bell Tolls, where scenes of preparation for the bridge demolition are
spliced with scenes of Andres attempt to reach the military headquarters.
Even within a single scene, Hemingway used the technique of cutting
writing for example in The Sun Also Rises:
Send him for champagne. He loves to go for champagne.
Then later: Do you feel better, darling? Is the head any better?
(62).
Amid these elements of Hemingways filmic aesthetic, it is eventually no
surprise to encounter Jakes observation in The Sun Also Rises that all countries look just like the moving pictures (18).
By drawing upon film to create a multi-focal aesthetic, Hemingway was
able to counter what he considered to be photographys flat style. Avowedly
suspicious of the one-shot photograph aesthetic, he resisted comparisons between his writing and photography, explaining in a 1949 letter to Charles
Scribner that photography made reality two-dimensional, and that his novels
should be rounded and not flat like photographs (SL 678). In an interview
he expanded upon this theme: If you describe someone it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what
you know, there should be all the dimensions (qtd. in Schnitzer 119).
The multi-focal aesthetic also aligned with Hemingways iceberg theory to counter what Koestler referred to as the novelists temptations: The
first and strongest temptation which the world outside the window exerts on
the writer is to draw the curtains and close the shutters, warned Koestler.

218

Zoe Trodd

In temptation No.2 . . . the man behind the desk . . . [leans] right out of the
window [and] begins to gesticulate, shout, and declaim. And in temptation
number three, the window is . . . left ajar, and the curtains are drawn in such a
way as to expose only a limited section of the world outside while hiding the
more painful and menacing sights from the authors eye. He may even push
a telescope through a hole in the curtain and thus obtain an image with admirably sharp contours of a small and perhaps not very important fraction of
the world (The Novelists Temptations 27). Resisting temptation number
one, Hemingways iceberg theory of omission doesnt draw the curtains
on omitted things. Instead it leavesin his own wordsa feeling of those
things as strongly as though the writer had stated them (DIA 192). The iceberg aesthetic also resists temptation number two: Hemingways omissions
insist upon what he called the part that doesnt show (qtd. in Plimpton
88)the part of his work that doesnt gesticulate, shout, and declaim. But it
is his multi-focal aesthetic that resists temptation number three: rather than
peep through the curtains at a limited section of the world outside and push
a telescope through a hole in the curtain, Hemingway telescoped in, out,
and around.
Hemingway also asked the reader to assist in this resistance of temptation. His iceberg theory of omission demanded that the reader feel the whole
story: it was, he explained in A Moveable Feast, a theory that you could omit
anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen
the story and make people feel something more than they understood (75).
Hemingways readers fill the gaps left by his omissions with their feelings and
round out his prose to make it three-dimensional, providing the next angle
in his multi-shot aesthetic. In so doing they might almost be responding to
instructions from the author, embedded in The Sun Also Rises and conveyed by
the unlikely mouthpiece of Lady Brett. When the count remarks: I should
like to hear you really talk, my dear. When you talk to me you never finish your
sentences at all, she leaves the final shot for her audience: Leave em for you
to finish. Let any one finish them as they like. (65)

No t e s
1. In his appendix to Hemingways Craft (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1973), Sheldon Grebstein recounts his discovery of the typed
quotation between the manuscript pages of chapter 34 in A Farewell to Arms (206).
Jamess interview is also published in Henry James On Culture: Collected Essays on
Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1999), 144145. For more on Hemingway and James see Neal
B. Houston, Hemingway: The Obsession with Henry James, 19241954, Rocky
Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1985): 3346. For more
on the problem of war and abstract language, see Christopher Isherwood, Lions and

Hemingways Camera Eye

219

Shadows (1938): war was never under any circumstances . . . allowed to appear in its
own shape, [it] needed a symbol (47).
2. In 1932 Hemingway observed: The dignity of the movement of an
iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. He explained: If a
writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things
that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a
feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them (DIA
192). Hemingway expanded upon his iceberg theory of writing in a 1958 interview
published in George Plimpton (ed.), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews,
Second Series (New York: Viking, 1960): I always try to write on the principle
of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
Anything you know, you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is
the part that doesnt show. If a writer omits something because he does not know
it then there is a hole in the story (88). He continued to explain his iceberg theory
in two posthumously published works, The Art of the Short Story (composed in
1959) and A Moveable Feast (1964). For more on Hemingways theory of omission
see Susan Beegel, Hemingways Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research, 1988); Gerry Brenner, Concealments in Hemingways Works
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983); Paul Smith, Hemingways Early
Manuscripts: The Theory and Practice of Omission, Journal of Modern Literature
10.2 (1983): 268289. For more on what this article calls the politics of form,
see Zoe Trodd, ed., American Protest Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2006), xxiiixv, and Ralph Ellison, Collected Essays: from the beginning our
novelists have been consciously concerned with the form, technique and content
of the novel, not excluding ideas. . . the major ideas of our society were so alive in
the minds of every reader that they could be stated implicitly in the contours of the
form . . . the form of the great documents of state constitutes a body of assumptions
about human possibility which is shared by all Americans, even those who resist
violently any attempt to embody them in social action (708). For examples of
politics of form in practice, see for example John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), which has a pre-determining interchapter before each narrative chapter
so that the reader experiences the inevitability of the migrants experience, and
James Agee and Walker Evanss Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), of which
Agee explained that the repetitious prose was designed to make the reader feel the
boredom of tenant farmers work. For more on the politics of modernist form, see
Marianne DeKoven, The Politics of Modernist Form (1992). DeKoven outlines
the politics of modernist forms disruptions of hierarchical syntax, of consistent,
unitary point of view, of realist representation, linear time and plot, and of the
bounded, coherent self separated from and in mastery of an objectified outer
world, its subjectivist epistemology . . . its formal decenteredness, indeterminacy,
multiplicity, and fragmentation (677).
3. For [t]alking about anything was bad . . . [etc] see the excised ending to
Big Two-Hearted River (1925), published posthumously in The Nick Adams Stories
(1972) as On Writing.
4. The year before Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls, he wrote a
barbed preface to photographer and artist Luis Quintanillas collection of Spanish
war drawings, All The Brave (1939), asking: How many words are there to be? . . .
The reader does not need them because the reader can look at the pictures (n.p.).
Hemingways own aesthetic of juxtaposition (images within paragraphs and clauses

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Zoe Trodd

within sentences) is echoed by Quintanillas images, which subtly juxtapose shapes

throughout the collection: a donkeys ears that repeat the shape of a planes wings;
folds in a soldiers trousers that repeat the shape of a dead mules ribs; wire on a fence
that repeats the shape of a dead Moors braid.
5. Hemingways paratactic style, which evokes a sense that the same timezone runs throughout paragraphs and pages, is often compared to the style of Paul
Czanne, who used an eye-level perspective. Hemingway compared himself to
Czanne, commenting to Lillian Ross as they toured the Museum of Modern Art:
I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Czanne. I learned how to make a landscape
from Mr. Paul Czanne (qtd. in Ross 41). He further explained in A Moveable Feast
(1964) that during the 1920s this learning process involved a search for dimensions:
I went there [to the Muse du Luxembourg] nearly every day for the Czannes and
to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first
come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something
from the painting of Czanne that made writing simple true sentences far from
enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.
I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to
anyone. Besides it was a secret (13). Czannes secret is perhaps that of omission.
Like the hidden seven-eighths of the iceberg, his frequent omissions of color and
decisions to sacrifice surface detail to achieve pure lines suggest the existence of
a world beyond the surface. For more on Hemingways debt to Czanne see Ron
Berman, Recurrence in Hemingway and Czanne, The Hemingway Review 23.2
(Spring 2004): 2136; Theodore L. Gaillard Jr., Hemingways Debt to Czanne:
New Perspectives, Twentieth Century Literature 45 (Spring 1999): 6578; Thomas
Hermann, Formal Analogies in the Texts and Paintings of Ernest Hemingway and
Paul Cezanne, Hemingway Repossessed, ed. Kenneth Rosen (Westport: Praeger,
1994), 2933; Kenneth Johnston, Hemingway and Czanne: Doing the Country,
American Literature 56 (March 1984): 2837; and Emily Stipes Watts, Ernest
Hemingway and the Arts (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
6. See also Benji in William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury (1929): Benji,
who knows the impossibility of articulating experience through words, remembers
the area on a wall where a mirror used to be and tries to touch it. The author would
like to thank the anonymous reviewer of Hemingways Camera-Eye for this
reference.
7. Dos Passos continued to express the problem of language through his
blended word-formations, which embody the monotonous mumble of words and the
experience of eyes made groggy with headlines (see for example newspaperreading,
easilyreplaced, waitingroom, publiclibrary, and historybooks).
8. For more on Hemingways politics, see Keneth Kinnamon, Hemingway
and Politics, The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 170197, and Stephen Cooper, The Politics
of Ernest Hemingway (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1987).
9. See Hemingway, Paris 1922, Item 64 and Story Fragments, Hemingway
Collection, JFK Library. For more on Hemingways montage style, see Amy
Vondrak, The Sequence of Motion and Fact: Cubist Collage and Filmic Montage
in Death in the Afternoon, A Companion to Hemingways Death in the Afternoon, ed.
Miriam B. Mandel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 257282.
10. See Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Item 64 and Manuscripts and
Notebooks for The Sun Also Rises, Item 194, The Ernest Hemingway Collection,

Hemingways Camera Eye

221

John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. Hemingway maintained that he wrote 39

different versions of the ending to A Farewell to Arms.
11. In fact, with their disruption of stasis, Hemingways multi-focal
descriptions echo a different aspect of Czannes style: his technique of painting
a series of planes. For both painter and writer, multiple shots on a scene create
an impressionistic reality. In The Sun Also Rises, for example, Hemingway writes:
Looking back we saw Burgete . . . Beyond the fields . . . A sandy road led down to
the ford and beyond into the woods . . . the road went up a hill . . . the road came
out of the forest and went along the shoulder of the ridge of hills . . . Way off we
saw the steep bluffs, dark with trees and jutting with gray stone (121122). Showing
reality from many angles, Hemingways filmic style echoes Czannes sfumatothe
blurred image or veiled form.
12. Hemingway combines these descriptions of a glacier and of a slow-gliding
bullfighter in a different passage of The Sun Also Rises, where a slow-moving bullfight crowd is like a glacier (168).
13. Hemingways Up in Michigan was first published in Three Stories and
Ten Poems (Paris: Contact Publishing, 1923).

Wor k s Ci t e d
Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 1941. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1960.
Breit, Harvey. Talk with Mr. Hemingway. New York Times Book Review. 17 September
1950: 14.
DeKoven, Marianne. The Politics of Modernist Form. New Literary History 23.3 (Summer
1992): 675690.
Dentith, Simon. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
Diggins, John P. Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order: Dos Passos as Historian. American
Literature 46.3 (November 1974): 329346.
Dos Passos, John. The Big Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936.
. The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions. Partisan Review 6 (Summer
1939): 2627.
. John Dos Passos: Interview with Charles F. Madden, Henry T. Moore, and
members of Drury College, Jackson State College, Langston University, and Tougaloo
College, February 3, 1964. Talks with Authors. Ed. Charles Madden. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. 411.
. John Dos Passos: Interview with Frank Gado, October 16, 1968. First Person:
Conversations on Writers and Writing with Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, Robert Penn
Warren, John Updike, John Barth, Robert Coover. Ed. Frank Gado. Schenectady: Union
College Press, 1973. 3155.
Ellison, Ralph. Society, Morality and the Novel. 1957. The Collected Essays. Ed. John F.
Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 2003. 698729.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: J. Cape and H. Smith, 1929.
Fussell, Paul. Introduction. Articles of War: A Collection of American Poetry About World War II.
Ed. Leon Stokesbury. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990. ixxix.
Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway; Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four
Decades. Ed. William White. New York: Scribners, 1967.

222

Zoe Trodd

. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Viga Edition. New York:
Scribners, 1987.
. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribners, 1932.
. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 19171961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribners,
1981.
. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Vintage, 1999.
. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. New York: Penguin, 1955.
. In Our Time. 1925, 1930. New York: Scribners, 1996.
. A Moveable Feast. 1964. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
. Preface to Luis Quintanilla, All The Brave. New York: Modern Age Books, 1939.
n.p.
. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribners, 1954.
. On Writing. The Nick Adams Stories. Ed. Philip Young. New York: Scribners,
1972. 233241.
Isherwood, Christopher. Lions and Shadows, an Education in the Twenties. London: Hogarth
Press, 1938.
James, Henry. Henry Jamess First Interview. The New York Times Magazine. 21 March
1915: 35.
Knapp, Bettina L. Gertrude Stein. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Koestler, Arthur. The Novelists Temptations. The Yogi and the Commissar. New York:
Macmillan, 1945. 2229.
. The Invisible Writing. London: Collins with Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
. Darkness at Noon. 1941. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Orwell, George. Arthur Koestler. 1944. Collected Essays. London: Secker and Warburg,
1961. 220232.
. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
Plimpton, George. The Art of Fiction XXI: Ernest Hemingway. Paris Review (Spring
1958): 88.
Ross, Lillian. How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? The New Yorker (13 May 1950):
4051.
Schnitzer, Deborah. The Pictorial in Modernist Fiction from Stephen Crane to Ernest Hemingway.
Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1988.
Stein, Gertrude. Composition as Explanation. 1926. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed.
Carl Van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1946. 453461.

Chronology

1899

Hemingway born July 21 in Oak Park, Illinois.

1917

Works as reporter for Kansas City Star.

1918

Service in Italy with the American Red Cross; wounded on

July 8 near Fossalta di Piave; affair with nurse Agnes von
Kurowsky.

1920

Reporter for Toronto Star.

1921

Marries Hadley Richardson; moves to Paris.

1922

Reports Greco-Turkish War for Toronto Star.

1923

Three Stories and Ten Poems published in Paris.

1924

A collection of vignettes, in our time, published in Paris by

Three Mountains Press.

1925

Attends Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona with Harold

Loeb, Pat Guthrie, Duff Twysden, and others. In Our
Time, which adds fourteen short stories to the earlier
vignettes, is published in New York by Horace Liveright.
It is Hemingways first American book.

1926

The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises published by

Charles Scribners Sons.

1927

Men without Women published. Marries Pauline Pfeiffer.

223

224

Chronology

1928

Moves to Key West.

1929

A Farewell to Arms published.

1932

Death in the Afternoon published.

1933

Winner Take Nothing published.

1935

Green Hills of Africa published.

1937

To Have and Have Not published. Returns to Spain as war

correspondent on the Loyalist side.

1938

Writes script for the film The Spanish Earth. The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published.

1940

Marries Martha Gellhorn. For Whom the Bell Tolls published.

Buys house in Cuba where he lives throughout most of the
1940s and 1950s.

1942

Edits Men at War.

1944

Takes part in Allied liberation of Paris with partisan unit.

1946

Marries Mary Welsh.

1950

Across the River and into the Trees published.

1952

The Old Man and the Sea published.

1954

Receives Nobel Prize for literature for The Old Man and
the Sea.

1960

Settles in Ketchum, Idaho.

1961

Commits suicide on July 2, in Ketchum.

1964

A Moveable Feast published.

1970

Islands in the Stream published.

1986

The Garden of Eden published.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelleys Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blakes Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map
of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of
Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994),
and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection
(1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Blooms provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their
predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist; How to Read and Why
(2000); Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002);
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003); Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004);
and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor Bloom
received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold
Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen
Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.

James Aswell, son of a ten-term U.S. Representative from Louisiana, was a writer who maintained a significant correspondence with Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Witter Bynner. His papers, including
materials related to his novels, The Midsummer Fires (1942), Theres One in
Every Town (1951), and Young and Hungry Hearted (1955), are at Northwestern University. He died in 1955.
225

226

Contributors

Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor, critic, and literary historian was

called by the New York Times the most trenchant chronicler of the so-called
Lost Generation of post-World War I writers. His many books include
Exiles Return (1934), Many Windowed Houses: Collected Essays on Writers and
Writing (1970), and Second Flowering (1973). He died in 1989.
T. S. Matthews was former associate editor of The New Republic and
editor of Time magazine. His books include an autobiography, Name and
Address (1960); O My America (1962), Great Tom: Notes Towards a Definition
of T. S. Eliot (1973) and Angels Unawares: Twentieth Century Portraits (1985).
He died in 1991.
John Dos Passos was regarded, along with Hemingway, as among
the most talented young American novelists during the 1920s and 1930s.
He and Hemingway were close friends from 1924 until 1937, when they
argued bitterly about Communist involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
Dos Passos wrote over 40 novels and histories, including Three Soldiers
(1922). Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the USA trilogy (collected 1938). He
died in 1970.
H. L. Mencken, author and journalist, was regarded during the 1920s
and 1930s as the most influential literary critic in America. He was editor
of the American Mercury and co-editor of The Smart Set. His many books
include The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development
of English in the United States and six volumes of his essays all published as
Prejudices (1919-1927). He died in 1956.
Ford Madox Ford is regarded as one of the most important forces
in the creation of literary modernism. As editor of the Transatlantic Review
in Paris during the 1920s, he was personally acquainted with the American
expartiates, including Hemingway. The best known of Fords many novels
is The Good Soldier (1915). He died in 1939.
Robert Penn Warren was professor of English at Yale University.
A distinguished and highly decorated poet, novelist, and critic, he was a
forceful voice in American literary criticism after the mid 1930s. The two
popular literary textbooks he edited with Cleanth Brooks, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), were pillars of the
post-WWII critical movement called New Criticism. The best known of
Warrens many novels is All the Kings Men (1946). He died in 1989.
Carlos Baker was Woodrow Wilson Professor of English at Prince
ton University. Though his literary interests were broad, he is best known

Contributors

227

for his work on Ernest Hemingway, including Hemingway: The Writer

as Artist (1952), Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969) and his volume of
Hemingways correspondence, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
(1981). He died in 1987.

Sheridan Baker was professor of English at the University of

Michigan, Ann Arbor. His many books include Ernest Hemingway: An
Introduction and Interpretation (1966). With Northrup Frye and George
Perkins he edited the influential Harper Handbook to Literature (1985). He
died in 2000.
Michael S. Reynolds was an independent scholar who devoted his
career to Ernest Hemingway, writing or editing ten books on him, including the acclaimed five-volume biography The Young Hemingway (1987),
Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989), Hemingway: The American Homecoming (1992), Hemingway: The 1930s (1997), and Hemingway: The Final Years
(1999). Reynolds died in 2000.
Bernard Oldsey is professor of English, emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University. A specialist on modern British literature, he wrote
Hemingways Hidden Craft (1979) and Ernest Hemingway: The Papers of a
Writer (1981).
Millicent Bell is professor of English, emerita, at Boston University. She is the author of Meaning in Henry James (1991); she edited The
Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (1998) and Hawthorne and The Real:
Bicentennial Essays (2005).
Erik Nakjavani is professor of humanities, emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published widely in psycho-philosophical literary
criticism and specializes in Hemingway studies.
Matthew J. Bruccoli was Emily Brown Jefferies Professor of
English at the University of South Carolina. Perhaps the most productive
American literature scholar of his generation, Bruccoli wrote or edited well
more than a hundred books, with a particular emphasis on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. His Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure
and the Authority of Success (1978) was revised as Fitzgerald and Hemingway:
A Dangerous Friendship (1994). Bruccoli was a distinguished bookman who
was central to the development of the American literature collection at the
University of South Carolina, which includes important archives related to
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and American literature between the World Wars.
He was founding editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He died in
2008.

228

Contributors

Mark Cirino taught creative writing and American literature at New

York University for eight years. He is the author of two novels, Name the
Baby (1998) and Arizona Blues (2000).
Trevor Dodman is visiting assistant professor of English at Wake
Forest University.
Zoe Trodd teaches in the History and Literature Program at Harvard
University. She edited American Protest Literature (2006) and To Plead Our
Own Cause: Personal Stories by Todays Slaves (2008).

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Index
Across the River and Into the Trees,
162, 175
Adams, Nick (character), 33, 6364,
67, 88, 161, 210
Adrianople, 62
Agee, James, 211, 213
Aisne River, 8
All Quiet on the Western Front, 20
Alpine Idyll, An, 57
American Civil War, 111, 120
American Red Cross, 71, 97, 114,
168
American Revolution, 211
Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-YearOld Boy, 116
Anderson, Charles R., 70
Anderson, Sherwood, 5, 13
anti-war novel, 149
Antony and Cleopatra, 101
Aosta, Duke of, 73, 80
Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway,
The, 74
Arkansas, 61
Piggott, 37
Armstrong (character), 191
Aron, Raymond, 140
Ashley, Brett (character), 15, 4750,
65, 100, 159, 178, 216
Augustine, Saint, 118
237

Austria, 55
Aymo, 150
Azevedo, Milton M., 170, 179
Baker, Carlos, 57, 6566, 69, 72, 74,
79, 83, 8788, 145, 179
Banal Story, 56, 57
Bantam New College Italian-English
Dictionary, 175
Bardacke, Theodore, 65
Barea, Arturo, 179
Barkley, Catherine (character), 6, 10,
1415, 17, 23, 3031, 38, 4243,
4649, 51, 63, 65, 7071, 80, 84,
87, 8991, 95, 97, 100101, 103,
106, 144, 148, 150, 154, 160, 163,
165, 173, 180, 185 171, 179, 192,
194, 199
Barnes, Jake (character), 49, 55, 59,
6365, 68, 79, 170, 211
Battler, The, 59
Battles
Fiume, 20
Marne, Second, 80
Paschendaele, 78
Vimy, 78
Waterloo, 10, 129
Beach, Joseph Warren, 179
Belloc, Hilaire, 79
Belmonte y Garca, Juan, 59
Best Short Stories of 1926, The, 56

238

Index

Best Short Stories of 1927, 56

Bible, 151
Big Money, The, 213
Big Two-Hearted River, 74, 90, 95
Bill (character), 59
Binswanger, Ludwig, 127, 138
Bird, William, 40
Bolshevik Revolution, 113
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 130
Bonello (character), 89, 102, 175, 176
Book of Common Prayer, 38
Bourke, Joanna, 187
Braddocks, Henry (character), 64
Brady, Matthew, 76
Brennan, Jack (character), 6061
British Voluntary Aid Detachment,
63
Britton, Jack, 61
Brooks, Van Wyck, 80
Bugs (character), 59
bullfight, 76
bullfighting, 56, 5960
Burke, Kenneth, 90
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 112,
123
Cabell, James Branch, 5
Caf Kutz, 59
Callaghan, Morley, 6
camera eye (literary device), 209218
Canary for One, 57
Canby, H. S., 72
Cantwell, Colonel Richard
(character), 38, 175
Cardinella, Sam, 76
Carnic Alps, 41
Caruth, Cathy, 193, 198, 200
Catherine, see Barkley, Catherine
Catholic Church, 56, 118
Cat in the Rain, 79
Charley (character), 217
Chateau-Thierry, 157
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 37

Chemin des Dames, 9

Che Ti Dice La Patria?, 56, 170,
174, 180181
Chicago, 89
Christ, Jesus, 58
Christian ethics, 45
Christianity, 56, 58
Civilization and Its Discontents,
115116
Clausewitz, Karl von, 111
Clean, Well-Lighted Place, A, 88
Cohn, Robert (character), 4950, 59,
79, 210, 215
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 46
Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, The,
135
Commune, 134
Communist Manifesto, The, 113
Composition as Explanation, 214
Conrad, Joseph, 25, 86
Coward, Noel, 154
Cowley, Malcolm, 32, 47, 62, 66, 72,
74, 139
Crane, Stephen, 64, 76, 99, 118, 151
Cuba, 123
Havana, 61, 111
Cummings, E. E., 149
DAnnunzio, Gabriele, 20
Darkness at Noon, 211212
David, Alfredo, 59
Davis, Lennard J., 192
Death, 40
Death in the Afternoon, 38, 57, 59, 69,
136, 211, 216
Defoe, Daniel, 7
DelCredo, Enrico see Simmons,
Ralph
Desdemona, 4647
Dial, The, 6
Doctor and the Doctors Wife,
The, 106

Index

Dorman-Smith, E. E. Chink, 76,

126
Dos Passos, John, 80, 149, 213, 216
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 134
Doyle, Jerry (character), 60
Dreiser, Theodore, 5
Dry Tortugas, 134
Duse, Elenora (character), 80
Eliot, T. S., 69
Elysian Fields, 125
Emilio (character), 172
Emmanuel, King (Greece), 80
Engels, Friedrich, 113
England
Brede Manor, 76
Enormous Room, The, 149
Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four
Major Novels, 84
Eros, 131, 140
Esquire, 75
Exile, 56
F. Scott Fitzgeralds Critique of A
Farewell to Arms, 152
Fabrizio (character), 129
Fairbanks, Miss (character), 171
Fascism, 98, 119
Faulkner, William, 140
Fenton, Charles, 74, 79
Ferguson (character), 17, 49, 70
Fifty Grand, 5657, 6061
Finnegans Wake, 132
Fishing the Rhone Canal, 215
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 67, 7980, 86,
88, 152, 155, 158
Fitzgerald, Zelda, 79
Flaubert, Gustave, 134, 152
Fleming, Henry (character), 64, 99
Florida
Key West, 37, 56, 61
Ford, Ford Madox, 57, 76

239

For Whom the Bell Tolls, 38, 46, 50

51, 111, 117, 140, 161162, 167,
170, 178179, 181, 210211, 214
France, 63, 158
Paris, 6, 37, 40, 55, 61, 79
Freud, Sigmund, 115, 117118, 127,
131, 140
Frohock, W. M., 57
Fussell, Paul, 198, 210
Garcia, Manuel see Maera
Gay Science, The, 129
George (character), 5859
Gerstenberger, Donna, 69
Gino (character), 175
God, 4041, 44, 109, 151
Goneril (character), 47
Good Soldier, The, 25
Gordinim (character), 177
Gorton, Bill (character), 49, 59
Goya, Francisco, 118, 130
Gratian, 118
Great Crusade, The, 129
Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, 172,
179
Greco-Turkish War, 72
Green Hills of Africa, The, 41, 78, 129
Greffi, Count (character), 30, 50, 59,
70, 87, 103, 108
Grosz, Elizabeth, 197
Hancock, Emmett (character), 171
Harry (character), 84
Harvard University, 79
Has Man a Future?, 123
Heidegger, Martin, 132
Hemingway,
Clarence, 104105
Ernest, 143
Hadley, 79
John Hadley Nicanor, 55
Marcelline, 168
Mary, 72

240
Patrick, 38, 61
Hemingway Collection, 84, 86, 89
Hemingway Reader, 157
Hemingways First War, 87, 143
Hemingways Hidden Craft, 151
Hemingways Other Style, 70
Hemingways Women, 65
Henry, Frederic (character), 6, 9, 14,
23, 28, 31, 3839, 41, 43, 45, 47,
4951, 55, 59, 62, 6467, 7072,
80, 84, 86, 88, 9091, 97, 100
102, 104 106, 109, 143, 147148,
153154, 160, 163, 165, 167, 171,
175176, 178, 180, 185, 187188,
190, 194, 196, 199, 209, 211
Henry IV, 65, 126, 129
Heraclitus, 132, 139
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 79
Herndl, Diane Price, 187
Hickock, Guy, 72, 80
Highet, Gilbert, 179
Hills Like White Elephants,
5657
Hinkle, James, 180
Home (concept of), 40
Homer, 7
homosexuality, 57
Horace, 83
Hotel Cavour, 158
Huddleston, Sisley, 6
Hudson, W. H., 25
Hugo, Victor, 129
Hutchinson, Percy, 72
Illinois
East Aurora, 20
Oak Park, 38, 105
In Another Country, 5657, 60,
70, 107, 152
Indian Camp, 96, 105
in our time, 40, 7576
In Our Time, 33, 55, 57, 6162, 84,
96, 105, 216
Invisible Writing, The, 212

Index

Italian
use of language, 167181
Italian Alps, 63
Italian Ambulance, 23
Italian Fascism, 113
Italy, 56, 71, 89, 95, 159160, 168
Abruzzi, 28, 41, 42, 45, 49, 99
Aquila, 42
Bainsizza plateau, 72
Caporetto, 10, 14, 19, 32, 42,
6263, 70, 7374, 97, 102, 143,
175, 194
Capracotta, 41
Carso, 77
Codroipo, 72
Cortina d Ampezzo, 72
Fossalta, 62, 96, 98
Fossalta di Piave, 72, 168
Friulian plain, 72
Genoa, 79
Goritzia, 77
Gorizia, 10, 14, 19, 4142, 44, 65,
72, 99, 102
Grappa, 77
Isonzo River, 89, 14, 41, 43, 72,
99
Latisana, 72
Mestre, 194
Milan, 10, 14, 19, 23, 39, 42, 44,
49, 61, 63, 73, 97, 99, 101,
107108, 143, 148, 154, 168,
175176, 181, 195
Mons, 76
Naples, 85
Plava, 72
Schio, 71, 77, 95
Stresa, 17, 43, 50, 172
Tagliamento, 6263, 95, 99
Udine, 72
Italy 1927, 56
James, Henry, 79, 209210
James, William, 125
Jaspers, Karl, 114
Jim (character), 217
John F. Kennedy Library, 84, 97
Jordan, Robert (character), 211, 214

Index

Josephs, Allen, 180

Joyce, James, 7, 132, 135
Julian Alps, 41
Kansas, 104
Kansas City Star, 71, 76
Kashkin, Ivan, 133
Kick (character), 68
Killers, The, 55, 56, 57, 59
King James Bible, 179
Kipling, Rudyard, 46, 49
Kiralfy, Imre, 23
Klein, Melanie, 127
Koestler, Arthur, 211213, 217
Krebs (character), 210
Kundera, Milan, 138
Kurowsky, Agnes von, 97
Lacan, Jacques, 127, 132
LaCapra, Dominick, 186, 193
Lady in the Green Hat (character),
16
La Finca Viga, 111
Lake Maggiore, 10, 43
landscape, 35
Lausanne Hospital, 43
Lawrence, Friar (character), 44
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 211
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 132
Levin, Harry, 69
Lewis, Robert W., 175, 179
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 43
Liebknecht, Karl, 116
Lieutenant (character), 88
Light of the World, The, 59
Little Review, The, 6
Liz (character), 217
Lovelace, Richard, 69
MacLeish, Archibald, 50
Macomber, Francis (character), 49,
64
Macomber, Margot (character), 47

241

Maera (character), 56, 59, 60, 76, 84

Manera (character), 32
Mann, Charles, 83, 152
Mann, Thomas, 152
Manning, Frederic, 64
Manolin (character), 59
Maria (character), 46, 161
Maritza River, 62
Marius the Epicurean, 26
Marvell, 44
Marx, Karl, 113
Mason, A. E. W., 215
Matter of Colour, A, 61
May, Rollo, 127, 137
Mazzaro, Jerome L., 69
McAlmon, Robert, 58
Measure for Measure, 135
Men at War: The Best War Stories of
All Time, 112
Men at War, 76, 118, 124, 129
Men Without Women, 56, 57, 107
Mercutio (character), 44
Meyers, Mr. and Mrs. (characters),
153
Michigan, 71
Middle Parts of Fortune, The, 64
Milan Hospital, 44
Milton, John, 157
Mippipoplous, Count (character), 50,
59, 103
Missouri
Kansas City, 37, 61, 168
Model T, 56
Modern Library, 25
Monte Maggiore, 79
Moretti, Ettore (character), 32, 89,
101, 178, 180
Morgan, Harry (character), 61
Morris furniture, 20
Moses, Carole, 170
Mount San Gabrielle, 77
Moveable Feast, A, 72, 78, 218
Mr. Britling Sees It Through, 30

242
Murdoch, Iris, 115
Mussolini, Benito, 20, 73, 89
My Old Man, 60, 96
naturalism, 51
Nazi ideology, 113
Nazism, 116, 119
New Jersey, 56
New Republic, 56
New York City, 89
New York Times, The, 5, 209
Nicaragua, 26
Nick, see Adams, Nick
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 117118, 123,
129
Nik, 130
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 213
Notes on the Next War, 113
Notheomist Poem, 56
Now I Lay Me, 57, 64, 88, 96,
107108, 161
Oak Park High School, 168
OBrien (character), 213
Old Man (character), 88
Old Man and The Sea, The, 55
Oldsey, Bernard, 151
On the American Dead in Spain,
120
On the Blue River, 117
On War, 111
opera, 167
Ophelia, 46, 47
Origin of the Work of Art, The,
132
Orwell, George, 210, 213
Out of Season, 57, 70, 170, 174,
181
Oxford Book of English Verse, 151
Palma, Nio de la, 59
Paradise Lost, 157
Paris 1922, 214

Index

Paris Review, 75
Passini (character), 32
Pater, Walter, 26
patriotism, 148
Peduzzi (character), 170, 174
Peele, George, 69, 152
Perkins, Maxwell, 37, 5657, 61,
7879, 81, 106
Pfeiffer, Pauline, 56, 97, 104
Phaedrus, 121
Phelan, James, 187
Piani (character), 68, 89, 175
Piave River, 72, 77
Pivano, Fernanda, 176
Plato, 121
Plimpton, George, 55, 58, 84
poetry, 126
polygamy, 48
Poore, Charles, 157
Pope, 41
Portable Hemingway, 74
Porta Magenta, 177
Pound, Ezra, 58, 70
Prussian Officer, The, 57
Pursuit Race, A, 57
Quinet, Edgar, 135
Rapallo, 58
Red Badge of Courage, The, 64, 76,
99, 151
Regan (character), 47
Regler, Gustav, 129
Renata (character), 175
Reynolds, Michael S., 71, 87, 168,
171, 187
Richardson, Hadley, 5556, 97
Rinaldi (character), 15, 31, 45, 48
49, 6265, 67, 70, 87, 89, 9798,
100, 102, 109, 150, 156, 173175,
191
Rocca (character), 173
Roman Empire, 113

Index

Romeo and Juliet, 38, 44, 50, 69, 101

Romero (character), 59
Ross, Lillian, 61
Rossi, Alberto, 74
Rubashov (character), 212
Russell, Bertrand, 123, 210
Russia, 113
Scarry, Elaine, 186, 192
Schadenfreude, 117
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 117118
Schorer, Mark, 89
Scribner, Charles, 106, 137, 217
Scribners, 56, 7879, 180
Scribners Magazine, 37, 56, 61,
8788, 152
Sedley, Amelia (character), 47
Selected Letters, 112
Serengetti Plain, 41
serial version, 152
Seventeen Points, 20
sexuality, 105
Shakespeare, William, 38, 46, 126,
128, 135
Sharp, Becky (character), 47
Shaw, George Bernard, 13
Siberia, 134
Simmons, Ralph (character), 89, 167,
177, 178,
Simple Enquiry, A, 57
Smith, Julian, 107
Smith, Mrs. (character), 217
Smith, Winston (character), 213
Smollett, Tobias, 7
Smyrna, 139
Snows of Kilimanjaro, The, 41, 84
Soldiers Home, 210
Spain, 56, 136, 139
Gorizia, 35
Madrid, 55
Pamplona, 49, 55, 79
Spanish Civil War, 113, 133, 149
Stein, Gertrude, 13, 15, 76, 78, 214
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 10,
118, 129130, 134
Storr, Anthony, 131

243

Strater, Mike, 76
suicide, 61, 85, 105
Sun Also Rises, The, 8, 15, 37, 55, 59,
70, 75, 79, 86, 104105, 152, 159,
170, 178, 210, 215, 217218
Sun Tzu, 114, 121
Switzerland, 14, 17, 23, 30, 4243,
45, 63, 69, 97, 102, 104, 160
Lausanne, 42, 71
Montreux, 42, 44
symbols, 147
syphilis, 89, 98
Tagliamento River, 10, 32, 72, 167
Tate, Trudi, 198
Tender Is the Night, 67, 86
Ten Indians, 5657
This Quarter, 6
Thomas, Dylan, 135
Three-day Blow, The, 59
Three Mountains Press, 40, 57
Three Soldiers, 9, 149
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 123
Today Is Friday, 5556, 58
To Have and Have Not, 38, 61
Tolstoy, Leo, 118
Tom Jones, 57, 61
Tommy (character), 59
Toronto Daily Star, 74, 77, 215
Toronto Star Weekly, 60
Torrents of Spring, The, 57, 79
tragedy, 38
Transatlantic Review, 76
trauma narrative, 185200
Treasury for the Free World, 112, 114,
120
Trismegistus, Hermes, 130
Troilus and Criseyde, 37
U.S.A., 214
Unamuno, Miguel de, 139
Undefeated, The, 55, 57, 5960
United States, 26
Up in Michigan, 217

244
Valentini, Dr. (character), 32, 70,
147
van der Hart, Onno, 189, 193
van der Kolk, Bessel A., 189, 193
Verlaine, Paul, 90
Very Short Story, A, 144
Veteran Visits Old Front, A, 71,
74, 77
Villalta, Nicanor, 55
Von Kurowsky, Agnes, 144
Waldmeir, 59
Walloon Lake, 105
War, 111141
Warren, Robert Penn, 63
Way Youll Never Be, A, 88
Weelson, Meester (Woodrow
Wilson), 20
Wells, H.G., 30
Wescott, Glenway, 79
Whiting, Charles, 140

Index

Wills, David, 188

Wilson, Edmund, 4647, 4950, 57,
66, 70, 213, 216
Wings over Africa, 114, 124
Wolfe, Tom, 134
women, 159
Women and Men, 57
World War I, 63, 71, 95, 104, 112,
116, 125, 143, 176, 210
Italian front, 19
World War II, 125, 210
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 214
Wyoming, 61
Big Horn, 37
Young, James, 64, 79, 188
Young, Phillip, 59, 69, 74, 83
Zola, Emile, 129
Zurito (character), 59